


the hateful moon shone

by glassy_light



Category: The Lighthouse (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Mild Homo-eroticism, Other, Slow Burn, but then got super long :'), enemies to brief lovers to enemies???, i feel like i blacked out every time i opened the google doc so really who knows, i think, it started as a character study, its tender, lit rally just the movie but...tender fuck me xoxo :')
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-01-23 20:00:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21325828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassy_light/pseuds/glassy_light
Summary: Fic exploring the time spent at the lighthouse by Winslow and Wake, the building tension between them, and their eventual descent into chaos & madness. Sorta AU, mostly character study.UPDATE: 3/29/2020After having the draft finished since January, and after months of not touching it, I had a "fuck it" moment and decided to just post. From ch. 3 on is;;; unedited draft fvgbhnjm. Which is horrible form, I know, but better late and sloppy than never??? Which is code for "expect future edits" and "im sick of looking at it in my google docs so im dumping this mess on you!! have fun". :')
Relationships: Ephraim Winslow & Thomas Wake, Thomas Howard & Thomas Wake
Comments: 17
Kudos: 34





	1. Prospects Aplenty

**Author's Note:**

> For story purposes, this fic is set on a fictionalized Wood Island off of Biddeford, Maine. If something is very painfully wrong, please let me know, I will be glad to change it. If you see familiar dialog, it's directly from the film.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A fic exploring the time spent at the lighthouse by Winslow and Wake, the building tension between them, and their eventual descent into chaos & madness. Tags will be updated as we go, updates will be as frequent as possible. Sorta AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome, dear reader! This story is set on a fictionalized Wood Island off of Biddeford, Maine. All references to lenses, uniform, and such are the result of research, but I am admittedly no Robert Eggers. If something is very painfully wrong, PLEASE let me know, I will be glad to change it. If you have any tips or suggestions on writing dialect, I would very much love to hear it! More info about references and resources used will be in the endnotes. :)!!!

_ During the paddle in, I questioned them at length about the man I was to see; they were full of fanciful and incoherent tales. He seemed to be a hermit; he burned a light all night, sleeping by day; he talked to himself: I could learn little more._

Lincoln Colcord, The Game of Life and Death: Stories of the Sea

The day that Ephraim Winslow arrived at Wood Island as a contracted relief keeper was clear enough. The sky was milky with clouds, but the sun burned in bright coldness above the gray muscle of the sea, and the wind was light and playful. The stout USLHT _ Gull _steamship embarked from Vine’s Landing in Biddeford Pool at noon sharp, and now was cutting swiftly through the sea at an agreeable 8 knots. Winslow stood at the railing, hands locked tight around the metal against the churn of the sea, keeping his head lowered against the taunts of the two grizzled deckhands, both in full USLH fig, and both equally foul-mouthed. With him was his old kit from up north, in it a King James bible worn ragged around the edges, two changes of clothes, and a letter, creased to oblivion, from his father. This was the extent of his personal effects; he had nothing else but the promise of government pay at the end of four weeks, which now stretched out before him, glittering with promise.

The further the ship wheezed from shore, the more stinging grew the October wind, the more the sea flexed and bucked against the hull, and the more Winslow realized he wasn’t much for sailing. Seeing him fight to remain upright sent the deckhands into uproarious laughter, and as the sky darkened Winslow prayed for a swift arrival. Soon a dense fog had set heavy around them, congealing in the air until the horizon was indistinguishable from the body of the sea. 

The mood on the ship soured, and Winslow was forgotten as the crew set to deal with the conditions. After a torturous amount of time fighting to keep down his breakfast as the ship struggled to cleave the waves, a light flashed into life, and the deep guttural bellow of a foghorn sounded with force and fury strong enough to match the brackish water. This was scant relief, as it gave little idea to Winslow how far they were from the light station, and for some time longer he watched the light wink in the distance.

When the ship did stop, he was expected to help load crates of supplies onto the picket boat, which he did obligingly, eager to have something steady underfoot. Once it was filled, he climbed abreast with a few of the crew, clutching the rough-hewn seat as the davit lowered them into the froth. The crew mercifully took up the oars, leaving none for him, and Winslow had naught to do but wait for their arrival, squinting at a figure on the beach obscured by the fog. 

This, he assumed, was the permanent keeper of the island, who had been mentioned only in passing by the man who had hired him. Winslow was to be his assistant, in all ways subordinate, but the pay was good enough to persuade him to take the job without hesitation. He knew only that the man’s last name was Wake, and that dire circumstances had left him without help in the keeping of the lighthouse. He did not know his age or his temperament, but his mind conjured a person of stern countenance, eerily similar to his least favorite foreman back in the timber woods. He frowned and shifted to stare resolutely at the pulsing yellow eye of the lighthouse, thinking of the feeling of sand underfoot as the rowboat pitched and keeled.

With a great heave the picket boat struck the shore, embedding itself in the soft brown sand that, by the scarce light filtered through the clouds, looked like barren ash settled after some catastrophe. For a horrible moment, Winslow felt dread coil in his stomach, feeling very much like he had just set foot on the shores of Herculaneum at the worst possible time, but it passed quickly, and he was then taken up with the cold water filling his shoes as they began to haul crates ashore.

Out of the mist limped an old man in wickie dress; on the lapel of his double-breasted coat was indeed the “K” insignia of a lighthouse keeper, and his cap bore a lighthouse in gold stitch. He held a whale-bone pipe tight between his teeth and stopped at the fringes of the group. As Winslow neared, a crew member shouted up, “Good luck with this lad, Wake, he’s not made of sailing stock,” to which the wickie laughed and said, “Thank Neptune, then, tha’ he will be on this damn rock, an’ not out at sea with ye.” Winslow’s face burned, both from the biting wind and embarrassment, but he steeled himself and extended his hand. The old man did not take it. 

“No time for tha’, lad, ye best see to the unloading of the supplies.” His tone was light enough, but it bothered Ephraim all the same. 

“Aye, sir.” _ Damnable old man! _ Hope of a companionable relationship evaporated then, which Winslow was not surprised by. He had many an ornery foreman up in Canada, and he wasn’t in the habit of optimism. 

The crew helped him to carry the supplies to a whitewashed brick shed, where many squat barrels of lamp-oil huddled in the dark, and tools of all kinds leered from the shadows. Once this was done, they traipsed back to the beach, scuffing the soft blank sand with their boots. One deckhand slapped him on the back as he left, perhaps in encouragement. 

Winslow lingered at the crest of the hill, his face turned into the light, his fists crammed into his pockets as he hunched against the wind. When he turned back to the sea, he saw that the picket ship was now being hoisted by the davit. 

Wake, who had been standing on the beach watching the crew, was now making his way painfully up the hill, panting like a dog all the while. He came to a stop next to Winslow, and for some time they stood in silence, watching the steamship fade into the fog. The finality of the situation began to set in, and with it, a heavy chill. The old man took a long draw on his pipe, breathed two curls of black smoke out of his nostrils, and then sighed.

“Time to give ye tha tour, right lad?” He turned his head to Winslow, and for the first time the two saw each other clearly. 

Wake had the beard of a sailor and foamy wild hair to match. His face was gaunt, and he seemed to have a perpetual world-weary squint to his rheumy eyes. The woolen uniform he wore, though the same government standard as Winslow’s, was starkly different to a careful eye. His lapel had the insignia of a keeper, the elbows of his coat were obviously mended, the buttons worn down to a dull shine. His face was weathered, etched with deep wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. When he moved, it was with an almost comically heavy limp.

Winslow stood half a head taller than Wake. His uniform was new; his lapel had the “1” given to first assistants, and the fit was loose (he couldn't afford tailoring on the dregs of his timber pay). He had a solemn look to him, and other than a bristly dark mustache, he was baby-faced. Through hardened by northern winters, he seemed pubescently delicate.

“Aye sir, I suppose so.” 

Thus began a rather dreary circling of the island. The old man set a startling pace with his limp, and though Winslow kept with him easily, it soon grew miserable as the sky unleashed a cold spray of rain. 

“Miserable, ain’t it? Tha’s tha way it be here on this cursed rock; wind is always a-changin’, storms never die.” Wake spoke in a gruff baritone that Winslow struggled to make out over the rain and surf.

“Ayuh! I’m from inland- up north.”

“Canada, then? What job did ye work?”

“Timber, sir.” Winslow studied the ground underfoot. Cold river water pounded in his head.

They soon reached a wooden building on the southern end of the island, shuddering in the wind and shedding its paint like snakeskin. Wake threw aside the door to reveal a double-ended peapod boat, along with some lobster pots and fishing supplies obscured by old heaps of canvas. From the boathouse into the waters of the cove ran greased wooden rails, with a winch to haul the boat in. “This be tha fishing dory; tha lobster pots. Shovels an’ buckets for clammin’, an’ all manner of tackle. Tha tracks make landin’ tha boat easy in calm waters, by God are they rare, an’ hell when it’s stormy. Tha winch is easy to use, even a timberboy like ye will use it with ease.” The air hissed through the rafters, which hung with coils of rope. Wake heaved the door closed against the wind, bolted it tight, and began a stilted lope back towards the house.

On the way, he pointed with a gnarled finger to the storage shed, which was set back about 30 feet from the house. “Ye know what tha’ be. Oil, paint, tools, and the like.” He swiveled slightly, pointing at the side door where a patch of stale earth was tilled. “Ye missed the warm months when we ‘ave fresh vegetables. In through tha’ door ’s tha kitchen.”

They reached the front door fully drenched, relieved to be sheltered from the wind in relative warmth. The house itself was worn and ill-tended; every step bore a creak, and the wind slid its claws under the door and rattled the window panes. The first floor opened to a sitting room, where a fireplace sat cold. A threadbare rug, a crooked bookcase, and a camelback couch were the room’s only amenities besides a locking roll-top desk made of dark wood. 

Through a low doorway was the kitchen, which had a coal-burning cookstove and a table with two low chairs. The pantry was low-ceilinged but full of dry goods and cooking pans. On the whole, it was unremarkable, and stank horribly of cooked fish.

Upstair was the sleeping quarters, which contained only two iron-framed cots with thin wool mattresses and two locking chests. To call it quaint would be a generous stretch, but it was better than a bedroll in a snowy forest. 

“This be yer home for the next four weeks, lad, ye would do well to make yerself comfortable.” The wickie said this with an indecipherable tone that made Winslow unsure of whether it was a strange jest, so he nodded his head and looked around the room. A single round window in the far wall fed a strained light into the darkness, casting it in grey. Plumes of dust swirled in the watery shaft of sun.

The old man neared, and set his hand briefly on the shoulder of Ephraim’s wool coat. He shuddered at the unexpected touch.

“Spook easy, do ye?” He patted his shoulder and turned down the stairs, “All right lad, it’s time ta see tha light.” Winslow, shamed, begrudgingly followed.

The light was connected to the house by a long, windowless hallway. The spiral staircase was wrought-iron, and in the center of the shaft hung weights. The cold seemed to intensify here; Winslow’s throat burned as it reached down into his lungs. He coughed into his fist, only to be met with “Don’t be catching a chill on me boy, thar’s work to be done.”

Wake was slow moving up the stairs, but between panting breaths he explained the purpose of the weights. “These here,” He started, “Turn tha light.” He stopped to catch his breath, “Tha rotation time for tha lens ’s around 20 seconds. Tha lens itself ’s a 4th order fresnel, tha light ’s white. Some stations run red lights, Abagadasset Point, for example. Not I. Plain glass shade I be using.” He spoke reverently, and delighted in the specifics (and carried on much too long to remain interesting in the slightest). Winslow bitterly wanted to tell him that he knew; that he had read the handbook and had seen the beam from the _ Gull_.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Wake stopped and wrapped his bony hand around the locked grate. “Of course, tha light ’s run on me shift,” he patted his pocket, “and I keep it under lock. Of course, ye read tha handbook-it’s only running now because of tha weather.” The old wickie pushed past Ephraim and started his descent. Once he made it a few steps down, he called out “Come now lad, ye haven’t seen tha foghorn.”

“What about the light? If I am to be its keeper, shouldn’t I know it’s workings?”

This inexplicably stirred the man into a rage, which only stoked Ephraim’s own temper. “Listen here boy, do ye be daft? I said tha light ’s run on me own shift, ye are to do tha other jobs.” His rheumy eyes opened wide, and the knuckles on the hand gripping the rail grew bone-white. 

“Aye sir, but-”  
“Shut yer soft-headed, impetuous young mouth!” Wake bellowed, and Winslow’s mouth snapped shut. He was almost upset with how willingly he gave in, but bit his tongue to hold back any vitriol that might slip out all the same. He gave a curt nod and motioned his hand in an “on with it, then” gesture. Wake muttered something under his breath, and it took all of Ephraim's restraint to not give the old man a hard shove. He instead balled his fists in his jacket and worked his tongue along his teeth as if taking stock of them.

The foghorn jutted out from a small, low building close to the lighthouse. The floor was coated in black coal powder, and the walls were streaked with it. By the time they were inside, the old man seemed to have his anger reigned in, and he began to wax on about the mechanism. “This be a Daboll trumpet. It’s a hot air engine, coal-powered. It’s regulated by an automatic cam, all ye need ta do is shovel tha coal. It only needs running when it’s stormy- I started it up earlier when tha fog set in.” 

He opened the coal box door to show the dying embers, then swung sharply to grab a wood-handled shovel that he promptly thrust into Ephraim's hand. “Ye can get to shoveling, boy. Get tha fire stoked and hot, and when yer done pull in tha lobster pots. I got to check tha light, but when yer done a fine hot supper will be ready for ye.” He went out the door then, letting out a short laugh that was lost to the wind. 

Alone in the suffocating heat of the room, Ephraim Winslow began to shovel. At first the work felt light, but the fire seemed to swallow the coals while growing no stronger. Wiping the film of sweat from his brow, he shucked off his coat, and began to work fast, feeding shovel after shovel of coal to the hot iron lips of the furnace, only to drop the shovel when the foghorn, apparently sated and now running well, screamed like a mad bull with choler enough to bring even Theseus to his knees.“_ Sunnuvabitch _!” 

He took this to mean that his work was done, and left the shovel where it sprung from his hand. He went out the door, tugging on his coat, and scrambling down to the water, tripping over scrub brush and sparring with the wind all the while. Overhead, gulls called out, hidden by the fog. 

After kicking at rocks and tripping through seaweed, cursing the sea and everything in it, he found where the traps were laid, and set about drawing the coarse rope through his hands until two wooden traps, one a barren womb and the other bearing only a lobster, were ashore at his feet. The tide was out but coming back fast, and from his spot by a craggy boulder, the beach stretched absurdly far out. 

Winslow knew very little about re-setting the traps, and had nowhere to put the lobster, so he crushed its head under his left bootheel, wary of its claws, and left it on the shore. As he reset the traps, stepping out as far as he dared to return them to the spray, he noticed the barnacles clinging to the rocks of the tidepools, and the anemones glistening like gobs of jelly in the shadowy water, and was instilled with a child-like curiosity of their foreign shapes. After a few minutes time loitering by the rocks, he turned to see a great white gull descend from the low-hung clouds, and take in its beak his only catch. It turned to him and winked its one eye, and was gone into the clouds again. 

“Bleeding hell!’ The surf was turning again, and he was reminded of this as water filled his boots. _ Its the weather, when it's clear the work will lighten._ He trudged back up the steep incline to the house, and looking back he fancied that he could see a sleek brown head, of a seal maybe, or some other alien creature of the surf, breach the foam. He sighed, frustrated with the old wickie, with his own green self, and with the occulted secrets of the old man and the sea. The gulls laughed wickedly above.

The sun had sunk into the horizon, boiling the water there, and the dark was setting around him so thick that only the island itself seemed to exist, floating alone in the dark gut of some beast. He cast his eyes up to the piercing beam of the lighthouse, but the old man could not be seen on the upper or lower gallery. He watched the spinning light warily as he stalked towards the door, stamped the mud off his boots, and then entered the house.

The first thing he noticed was a soft singing from the kitchen, punctured by moving pots and pans:

“_ I cast my line in Largo Bay, _

_ And fishes I caught nine: _

_ There’s three to boil, and three to fry, _

_ And three to bait the line.” _

He listened to Wake’s voice, surprisingly vulnerable when compared to the gale-force of his earlier rage, while spreading his coat and vest in front of the fire to dry, leaving his hat on a hook by the door. Ephraim went to stand in the kitchen door, his hand resting on the tired wood.

“_ The boatie rows, the boatie rows _

_ The boatie rows indeed,” _

The last line sank under his breath as he lifted the lid off a deep pot to stir something. Suddenly aware of the presence in the doorway, he called over his shoulder, “Ye got any chanties from up Canada-way boy? Or do ye work in silence up thar?”

“None that I remember, sir. We worked mostly in the silence of the woods.” He moved from the doorway to the warmth radiating from the stove, standing just to the side of the old man. When he looked, he couldn’t see much of his face, but the old man’s mood seemed much improved from earlier. He couldn’t say the same.

“Ayuh? Makes fer dreary work, son. How’s tha catch?” The wickie turned from the stove. 

He too had abandoned his coat, cap, and vest and stood now wearing an ash gray guernsey sweater. 

Ephraim shifted uneasily, “Not good sir, the lobster pots were empty.”

“Tha’ so? Humph. Must be tha changin’ of tha wind,” He seemed lightly suspicious but did not press Ephraim, “Tonight we sup on a fine stew. Yer lucky, lad, that I started it this morning. Set tha table.”

Ephraim did as he was told. The tin dishes from the cupboard were cold in his hands, and dented to hell and back, but he would be lying to say he wasn’t impressed with their shine. His initial impression of the worn-out homestead was tentatively changing; the old man clearly ran a tight ship with the sparse things available to him. Looking into the bottom of the dish, he found a distorted version of himself peering back. He looked harsher than he meant, and tried to smile slightly, but it looked hollow. Soon the table was dressed with their dishes and silverware (comprised of a motley assortment of patterns, and without realizing it he found himself with the same pattern he ate with in his father’s house), and Wake hobbled over with the stew-pot, ladle in hand.

After their bowls were filled, the older man returned to set the pot on the stove, and Winslow had enough sense about him to wait before tucking in, starved as he was. Wake returned with a bottle in hand, filled both their cups before sitting heavily down in the seat opposite Winslow. The wickie raised his cup,

“_ Should pale death with treble dread, _

_ Make the ocean caves our bed, _

_ God who hear'st the surges roll, _

_ Deign to save our suppliant soul,_” he smiled a toothy grin, leaning in close over the table on his elbows. His smile faltered when he saw the hesitation in Winslow, “Bad luck to refuse a toast, best drink up.”

“Aye, but the handbook forbids drinking...”

“Oh! Damn the handbook. Me word is good as law on this ‘ere rock, and I ain’t about to call in all sorts of trouble with an unfinished toast,” His eyes blazed, his brow furrowed, and he shook his cup hard enough to spill the brew.

Damn the handbook? The old man was fixing to see him in trouble with the inspector, Winslow was sure of it, but he didn’t want to upset the man further, and so stood sharply up, cup in hand, and headed for the sink. The water pump was loud, churning the unseen waters of the cistern to life, bringing up a flow colder than ice. Seated once more, he met the old man’s eyes to find them aglow with amusement, no longer full of ire. 

“There’s a good boy,” Their cups met, and Winslow raised it to his lips, only to choke on the brackish water. The old man wheezed out a laugh, “Still tastes of the brine, don’t it? Tha drink be tha best thing for ye. But a finished toast is a finished toast, says I.” With that he began to shovel steaming broth into his mouth, eating grotesquely, food spilling down his chin.

Winslow sat, clutching his spoon in his hand, and turned his eyes to his plate in disgust. When tasted, the stew was overly-salted, watery, and had not much in it but potatoes and a few grizzled clumps of dried cod. 

They ate in silence- loud silence, on account of the old man’s chewing. When finished, Wake ordered the exhausted Winslow to “Scrub tha plates.” He stood and limped loudly down the long hallway to the lighthouse, assumedly to check the burning of the lamp.

All the work on the island seemed miserable. The pump water was brought up reluctantly and was cold enough to burn his hands, spattering indignantly over his arms and front and fireclay of the sink. Once this chore was done, Winslow retired to the sitting room, hands burning. The clock on the mantle read that it was early in the evening, and having nothing else to do, he went over to the rolltop desk. 

It was locked.

This angered him, and he wandered the room to find a key, but then remembered the old man ( _ I keep it under lock) _ and fell, resigned, onto the couch. It let out a wheeze. Winslow sat, staring at the embers in the grate, until Wake limped into the room. With tired eyes and heavy head, Winslow regarded him.

“Ye be looking half-dead, boy.”

He sighed, “Aye, sir.” 

For a fearful lucid moment he thought he would receive a blow, but the wickie let out a hard laugh, and Winslow joined him. “Yer alright,….” Wake trailed off in absence of a name and was about to tack on “lad” or “boy” when Winslow cut in.

“H- Winslow. Ephraim Winslow.” He said it a second time, as if to grip it tighter. The old man looked at him warily, eyebrows raised in distant curiosity, and did not offer his own name.

“Alright, Winslow,” He dragged forward from the shadows of the room a rocking chair, and produced from his pocket a pair of thin, wire-framed glasses. “What’s a timberman like ye want with being a wickie? Sick of cutting wood, of cold winters?”

“Oh...Yeah, I suppose so. Sick of all them trees an’ all that silence…” He could see in the vapors of the past a cold river rushing by, and a blond-haired man staring at him with doe-eyes.

“Well, no tree’s here Winslow, not unless you call them wind-beat pines down by tha boathouse ‘trees’.” This seemed to end their conversation. Wake began to pack tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

Winslow watched as Wake lit his pipe, and produced from seemingly nowhere a knitting project. The old man’s deft hands worked the thread into a basket stitch, and entranced by the creation of fabric, Winslow began to drift into the haze between sleep and waking.

The air was pulpy, and the general outline of Wake lingered, knitting still, beyond his focus. Time oozed back slowly, beyond the _ Gull, _beyond Biddeford, back to the lumber camps. Startling fragments of foremen and lumberjacks and log jams and, most strikingly, an angelic towhead walking between aspen and pine and oak boughs, flickering about before being washed away…

“Winslow ….Winslow! Ye best be up to bed, boy, yer adrift. Yer true shift starts in tha morn’ but now to tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”

He roused from his lethargy to see Wake peering at him through his thick frames, and without much thought, he stretched and crept up the stairs to his bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You made it! This chapter was very much an introduction, things will pick up from here. Now for the little things (pedantic, I know.):
> 
> -USLHT Gull: "USLHT" standing for "U.S Lighthouse Service Tender", denoting a ship that carries supplies to lighthouses. Pre-1910, the government agency presiding over light stations was the U.S Lighthouse Establishment, but thankfully the acronym could fit either, so I didn't change it.  
-Picket boat: a small boat commonly used as a ship's boat to carry people/supplies to land.  
-Davit: Would have been radial davits, which would mechanically lower the ship's boat into the water from the larger vessel.  
-"Ayuh": Regional slang for "yes" used in Maine. Extant; I'm reaching to say that it was used back then. Sounds cool though, right? :)  
-the boathouse tracks: OK! In the film, we see a ramp of sorts. Wood Island had greased wooden rails with a winch to haul it back up. The account providing this info was from the '60s and the winch was motorized, but it's a simple enough device that it could have been hand-operated, which is the route I decided to go for our fictionalized 1890's version. (This is not important at all!!!! Oh dear god what am I doing.)  
-Fresnel lens: Type of lens used in the film & at Wood Island. Ours is a beehive (as opposed to a bivalve) fresnel. The order refers to the size; a 1st order Fresnel would be the largest. A "shade" is just a glass (colored or not) tube that would be placed over the lamp inside the lens to change the color of the light.  
-Daboll trumpet: Type of air trumpet foghorn.  
-Wake's kitchen song: Found in The Amber Gods and Other Stories by Harriet Elizabeth Spofford, an author from Maine alive in the period. I admittedly only skimmed the book, but it's available free to read online if you are interested.  
-The toast: Taken directly from the film!!! :) Maybe in a later chapter I will try my hand at writing one, but it was just too good to leave out.  
-"Tired nature's sweet restorer...": An Edward Young quote.
> 
> If you are interested in anything mentioned above, I highly recommend the USLHS archives, they have tons of great info. Dear reader, if you liked it (or found it very dull...), let me know! I am all ears & too much free time.
> 
> And now for photos of Wood Island!:  
Wood Island, 1856: https://archives.uslhs.org/sites/default/files/images/Wood%20Island%20ME%20ca%201857%20USCGHO.jpg  
Wood Island, Undated (this one is just lovely!)  
https://archives.uslhs.org/sites/default/files/images/26-LG-4-54B.jpg


	2. Lighea, Daughter of Calliope

_On the other hand, those Syrens, too analogous to humanity, were all the more taken and detested for a diabolic mockery. In such horror and hate were they held in the eyes of the middle ages that their appearance was considered a prodigy, an omen that God permitted to terrify sinners. People scarcely dared to name them, and made haste to get rid of them. Even the bold sixteenth century still believed them to be men and women in shape, but Devils in reality, and not even to be touched, excepting with the harpoon._  
Jules Michele, The Sea (La Mer)

Ephraim was drowning. There was no sun or trees in sight, as if God in a fury had decided to steal the comforts of such earthly landmarks away from him. In this murky distance, something shill echoed, warped.

The sound was high-pitched and pulsing, thickening in the water like blood. Inexplicably, he was struggling forward, unfeeling, into the water, which seemed a still glass pane in the diffused, pallid light. He was going under, churning the liquid glass and he went down, eyes stinging. He didn’t know why he couldn’t stop, didn't understand the purpose with which he moved, didn’t know if the cold water was that of the sea or of some other tomb. His thoughts congealed, his mind slowed. It hurt to look at the light that filtered down, wavering in front of him, dizzying and indecipherable. Something moved through it in the silver distance, and he made a pained attempt to look down, to all sides, but found nothing. There was only a lack, a hollow displacement where he felt something should be. Looking at the silver-casted water burned, as if the absence itself was blinding.

Again the sound pierced through the water, this time louder; loud enough to rival the foghorn. If he was on steady ground he would have fallen to his knees, would have covered his ears, would have prayed for it to stop, but in his steady downwards fall through the gelatinous surf he could do naught but open his eyes in horror and garble air through his mouth, choking on his panic.

Then, all around him, something circled, glinting like a dagger or something just as deadly. The water was seethed around him in a ring, visible by a belt of bubbles that rose overhead, not unlike the rings of Saturn. The shadow drew closer, appearing through the water as a warped human figure. A flash of scales to his right; a sudden flow of silken hair to his left, and then suddenly, looming just out of reach, the face of a beautiful woman.

In horror, his vision was lashed to her. Ephraim’s lungs burned, and his head throbbed from the pressure. In an effort to cry out he gasped cold water into his lungs, staring at her sleek face. Her face was catlike, with large inhuman eyes. Behind her parted lips hid sharp teeth, more a wolf than human. His gaze traveled down her, from her mouth to her swan-neck, to the plane of her chest, to her breasts. On the sides of her ribs pink gills flared, plume-like and heaving as the alien creature before him breathed the living water of the sea. She had no navel- was not of natural birth. Further down still, he saw the glinting scales that freckled her hips, emerald as pine needles or fir boughs.

The light around him was fading as he sank further, the strange creature following, whipping the glare into gray rivulets, screaming her piercing cry. He winced every time her wail sounded; if on dry land his eyes would have been wet with tears. She drew closer as they plummeted, her long, lithe tail a weapon with which she cut the water.

In the growing dark, the creature, beautiful and misshapen, was reaching out to him. Slick webbed fingers traced along his jaw, fingers clutching his skull almost harshly. In wonder and terror his eyes focused on her lubricious mouth, perfectly formed, until she, in all her Cytherean beauty, was close enough that he could feel the aching space between them-  
-and then he was awake, sitting up in the dark, struggling for breath, heart frisking in his chest. He was bewildered and excited and alarmed.

Ephraim lay back down in the faintly sea-damp warmth, eyes open and unseeing. Under him in his mattress, something hard bulged against his spine. He felt with his hand, slick with sweat, for the thing. There was a gaping hole in his mattress, fraying at the edges. Through it he pushed his fingers, and from the wool and straw he tore a bone.

It was heavy in his hand when he retrieved it, and oddly textured, and no amount of feeling it over in his hand brought him the relief of knowing what it was. He tucked it under his pillow, shut his eyes, and tried valiantly to return to sleep, but remained uncomfortably agitated, and though the rest of his sleep was comfortingly dreamless, it was unfulfilling.

* * * *

In the velvet dark, Thomas Wake was smoking. He stood outside in the wind, puffing out clouds of tobacco smoke. The rain was gone, the whole island fresh-smelling and dewy. With his back anchored against the light tower, he stared absently at the wine-dark waves, listening to them cresting against the sand. He scanned the sky for the glow of the moon, or Polaris, or some other frozen god, but bloated clouds lingered in the sky, dead and heavy. He pointedly avoided thinking of Winslow, of his ineptness, as he emptied the bowl of his pipe and stamped out the embers. With stilted breaths, he made his way up the lighthouse steps.

The light drew him in closer, a liquid pull on his heart, like hooks strung through the deepest cavity of his chest. In his lunacy, he could hear the frequency of the burning lamp, the smooth, rolling sound of the light that burned almost hot enough to deafen. Its ululation was as familiar to him as his own soul, and as the key struck into the lock and unwound its tight hold, Wake felt a coiling in the pit of his body: an anticipation like the tenseness of a jungle panther; like the edge of something savage.

When in the room he restrained himself, and for a moment averted his eyes. Looking down, he circled the small room, and locked the grate when came back upon it. Now sealed in his glassy sepulcher, Wake began to strip.

The glass pane opened. Bare to the light, he took full communion of it. He watched the throbbing brilliancy, close enough to feel its divine heat. In a transcendent haze, he reached into the blinding glow, pupils flushed wide against it, and took in his outstretched hand the pulsing tendrils; the tissue of a god wet and searing. In his ecstasy he could see his own mortality; his paper-frail being, and in contrast the churning power and electric energy of the light; its solid purpose.

Exerted, he fell to his knees, drunk on the blaze. He sat there until pink dawn bled into the sky, waning in and out of lucid thought. As the sun broke over the horizon he scoffed and slowly stood, joints cracking. The thing was a weak imitation that paled next to his own seraph. He dressed, reverently unlit the lamp, and polished the lens until it was brilliant even in the dim morning. He drew over the windows heavy canvas curtains against the sun, and watched as it slunk ashamedly behind a tendril of cloud, as if aware of its own sins and shortcomings.

* * * *

Ephraim woke to the uneven stomp-shift-slide of Wake’s bad leg, first in the sitting room and then on the stairs. The weak dawn was leaking through the window, puddling hazily on the floor. He shut his eyes against it, and turned his face to the wall. When Wake crested the stairs he stood in silence, surveying Ephraim’s motionless form, before limping to his own bed and slumping arthritically to sitting, “Time fer ye to get up, boy. Yer shift is ta start now.”

Ephraim shifted between his sheets, reluctantly shaking off sleep. He sat up, looking at Wake with ruffled hair and eyes heavy with the weight of his visions. “Aye,” his voice was rough from Morpheus’ spell, “Aye sir. What am I to be doing?” He scrubbed at his face with the heel of his hand. When he looked at Wake, the old keeper’s eyes seemed wild, more fit for an animal than a man.

“Firstly,” Wake had taken off his cap and hung it on the bedpost, “You should get some food in ye. Thar’s some water set to boil on tha stove for yer coffee. Then, tha house needs tidying, and tha boathouse too.” He was working the buttons of his vest open; had already shed his coat already. “I’ve shown ye tha cistern; tend to it. And bring coal to the signal house, the weathers clearin’ so no need to run the fog horn. That should keep ye busy.”

The old man folded over to unlace his shoes, and Winslow slipped out of bed to get dressed. The wood floor was cold beneath his feet. He struggled for a moment with the buttons at his neck before freeing himself of his undershirt, leaving him open to the chill. Wake toed off his boots and tugged his sweater over his head. He had been wearing his union suit under his clothes, and if Winslow were to look over his shoulder, he might have thought Wake looked almost pitifully frail in it.

He dressed quickly, tugging on a pair of bibbed coveralls from his trunk. Then, kneeling for a moment, he felt for the vellum of the folded letter at the bottom of the chest. It was there. Wishing for his own lock to seal it away, he went to make his bed. Wake mistook his stance. “Yer a praying man, then?”

“Not as often as I might,” He clumsily smoothed the sheets, and in a sly movement palmed the object he had pushed under his pillow. Wake was still sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched over with elbows on his knees. He regarded Winslow carefully. “I’m God-fearing, if that’s what your askin’.”

“Good lad.” The old man grunted and crawled into bed. Winslow stood there for a moment, seeing in the new light the small collection of objects scattered around Wake’s bed and plastered on his wall. When he went down the stairs, he made a subtle effort to be quiet.

Sure enough, a kettle was beginning to rumble on the stove when he ambled into the room. He pulled from his pocket the figurine, and stood in awed surprise until the kettle whistle broke his paralysis. His expression was of a man eyeing a dog that was inclined to bite. With one hand, he moved the kettle to the enameled steel countertop to stop its wailing. The other he held around the object in a controlling fist.

The mermaid was carved whalebone, and did not much resemble the lithe creature from his dream. It was plumpish, almost formless, and her face lacked the elegance and unassuming violence possessed by the eyes of his vision. Her front was worn, and grime was stuck in the grooves of her scales. Despite all this, it enraptured him. While he hunted for something to fix for breakfast, he kept her close in his overall pocket, the one over his throbbing heart.


	3. ‘Tis Brass Work

_ Oh what is the bane of a lightkeeper’s life _

_ That causes him worry, struggle and strife, _

_ That makes him use cuss words and beat on his wife? _

_ It’s BRASSWORK _

_ What makes him look ghastly consumptive and thin, _

_ What robes him of health, vigor and vim, _

_ And causes despair and drives him to sin? _

_ It’s BRASSWORK… _

Frederic W. Morong ,  It’s Brasswork: The Light-Keepers Lament

After eating, Winslow found for himself a rag, and wiped down the table and washed his dishes. In the sink was a bowl from what must have been Wakes end-of-shift meal. He begrudgingly tended to it, then moved quietly to the sitting room, cleaning the inside of the window panes and dusting the bookshelf. 

He stopped for a moment to run his fingers along the spines of the books. There was a slew of sea novels, a volume of Poe and a volume of Byron. A handbook that must have been Wake’s stood out to him; from the top of it sprouted fronds of paper. He cast his eyes to the ceiling, and then pulled it off the shelf. 

He held it gingerly in his hands for a moment, then cracked it open, careful to keep the papers where he found them. Most were Lighthouse Establishment circulars, along with a few correspondences with the Inspector asking for permission to build a henhouse, which was denied bluntly. Then from the pages a folded membrane fell, so black with ink it looked bloody.

He stooped to pick it up, and found between his fingers a rendering of the lighthouse in fine lines, with the lens a placid epicene face instead of a glowing lamp. Behind it was the black of night, the waves huge and roaring. He thought he could make out a figure in the surf, the shape of a man standing, crimping a trident between a crab-like fist. For a moment he could hear the pounding of the surf. 

Winslow did not think much of the drawing, other than if drawn by Wake it was rather good. He was, however, filled with a vague sense of guilt and intrusion, and so replaced the book back on the shelf and continued about the room. After sweeping the floors and seeing that they were still not satisfactory, he hunted for a bucket and brush and went about laving the floors. On his hands and knees, he diverted his attention to the grain of the floorboards, and tried valiantly not to remember doing the very same task in the bunks of the lumber camp. 

It took him just under an hour to finish with the downstairs floors, and with plenty of day ahead, he went out into the sea air. Overhead the soft colors of dawn had faded, and the sky was dappled with milky clouds. The wind that had gusted so fervently the day before had choked on itself and died to a soft gasp, and the rain was gone altogether. The sun seemed a hollow disk of muddy light.

The island itself looked no better in the clear weather. It was all but barren, the only signs of earthly life other than himself was the scrub grass that clung limply to the sandy soil, the two battered fir trees that stood with bend shoulders by the boathouse, and the absurd amount of gulls that bobbed on the waves, circled overhead, pecked in the sand.

Winslow felt unsettled by the open heavens, and felt oddly bare to judgment. The forests up north were so dark at times as to block out all visions of the sky, and so vast and encompassing that they swallowed all sense of time and place in a larger world. They swallowed you alive and held you comfortingly tight, safe from the eye of the sun and moon and stars, kept in unearthly limbo. He felt more at ease the day before when the mists obscured the sky.

He headed for the shed, the ground gummy and waterlogged, a wet tongue underfoot. He had read the handbook; knew that powdered chalk was needed to neutralize the lead in the cistern. He found a bag of the ghostly stuff and an old broom handle for the stirring, and lugged both to the cistern. When he opened the latched door and saw the inky water, foul-smelling and stagnant, he was disgusted that he had ever drunk it straight, and resolved to boil all his water going forward. Unsure of the amount of chalk the water required, he dumped in half the bag, and stirred it for quite a while, watching the foam that formed on the surface perform all manner contortions. It seemed to seethe with reluctance to purify.

When he stood, his trousers were damp with two circles of water over his knees and the weather was beginning to seep into his bones. He pulled tighter around him his coat, and went back to the shed.

Loading the wheelbarrow with coal was one task, and pushing it up the rocky incline to the signal house was another. After a long struggle, he finally crested the rise, only to find a sea bird waiting for him. Winslow took a few long breaths, filmed in drying sweat, and dropped the handles so the whole load rattled. “Get ye gone now.”

The bird fluffed its wings smugly before letting out a harsh, dry croak.  _ Cursed bird!  _

Winslow reached out and took in his fist a rock of coal. “Go on, ye foul creature,” he snarled it with as much menace he could muster. When the bird showed no sign of leaving in fear, he launched it at the bird’s head. 

He missed by a handbreadth. The one-eyed seabird threw back its pearly head in laughter, and spanned its wings wide, brushing Winslow’s hair with its feathers as it disappeared into the sky. Feeling foolish, Winslow rubbed the back of his neck and then unloaded the coal. When he left, he thought he saw movement flicker behind the crown glass of the bedroom window, but took it as the light playing across the warp.

* * * *

There was a track worn straight across the island to the boathouse, studded with rocks and spongy moss. It cut through a thick patch of cordgrass that came up to Winslow's waist, billowing in the soft, sighing air, giving the impression of wading through a green pool. A few low winterberry bushes glowed in the green tide like hot eyes. As the ground churned to mud closer to the boathouse, cinnamon ferns curled around his legs, browning in the cold. 

He found the side door of the boathouse unlatched and swinging in the wind, peels of paint scattered on the ground. The interior of the yawning mouth was in disarray. Coils of rope that had hung neatly from the rafters had fallen; boxes of of buoys and tarred rope and old nets with holes big enough for a man to fit through were toppled. The peapod boat itself was pulled all the way to the wall on the tracks, and was missing one of its oars. A heavy-set dory loomed against the far wall, tarred hull spiderwebbed with cracks.

Winslow began by winding coils of rope, by righting crates and boxes. The work was boring, but wasn’t very strenuous. He sorted tackle, stacked buckets of nails and cold tar, swept the dirt floor, replace the oars into the boat. 

When the boathouse was as tidy as it could be, he went and sat under one of the tired firs and watched the tide until the light began to leech from the sky, running his hand over the whale-bone figure. Winslow stood and stretched, hauled in the traps, and returned to the house with three lobsters in a pail, whistling as he walked.

He stamped the mud off his boots, latched the door behind him, and was beginning to take off his coat when he noticed Wake was in the kitchen slamming pots. His whistle died in his throat as Wake entered the room. “What have ye been doing all day, boy?” 

Winslow slowly took off his hat, “Sir, I did all that was asked a’ me…?” His voice ticked up into a question at the end despite himself.

“You have dawdled your time! Lapsed in your duties!” He gestured with arms open wide to the room.

“Sir...I scrubbed these here boards twice over...”

“You lying mongrel! I asked ye ta swab tha floors, an’ when I came down I find this! Look a’ tha floor! Tha kitchen! They ain’t fit ta spit on. I can’t imagine what state the boathouse is in!”

Winslow had his hands fisted tight in coat, “Listen ‘ere, I washed the floors, scrubbed the whole ramshackle quarters top to bottom twice over. It ain’t no fault of mine that this place is so worn down, so foul that no amount of work could perfect it-”

“Ye are but a dog, but dare ta contradict me? If I says it, tha’s tha law. If I says ta swab tha floor, ye will do it, an’ ye will like it, an’ if I says ta tear this place apart and ta put it back in order, ye will do it! Now get yerself ta work, dog!” Wake whole face was a blaze of fury, and when he crossed the room it was with such hostility that Winslow struggled to not shy away, but it was only to tear the bucket from his hand.

Wake disappeared back into the kitchen, muttering under his breath. Winslow thought he heard, “ _ A’ least to-day we ‘ave a catch,”  _ but did not want to indulge in optimism. He let out a breath he had been holding, and then sulked into the kitchen, edging around Wake, and returned to the sitting room with a bucket and brush. He moved slowly, like he was full of wet sand. When he sank to his knees to scrub the floor, he couldn’t help but long for a smoke. It felt like some kind of supplication, and he resented it.

Dinner was tense. Before he allowed them to eat, Wake made a show of inspecting Winslow’s work. He muttered under his breath, pacing the floor while Ephraim sat on the first step of the stairs, scared and ashamed as a beaten child, and angry underneath it all.

The food itself was better than yesterdays stew, seeing that it was just plain steamed lobster and soft potatoes, but the mood was sour and neither of them enjoyed it. Wake rushed through his toast, face puckered with ire. Winslow reluctantly consummated the toast, leaving drink in his cup for fear of angering the wickie, but kept it untouched. 

The old man finished first after ruminating louder than any sort of animal, and threw his dishes into the sink with a crash. “When yer finished, wash tha plates an’ then run ta tha boathouse an’ fetch some rope for oaksum. Ye’ll pick it while ye sit by tha fire.”

“Aye, Sir.” Winslow looked down at the plate and pushed the food around for a few minutes more before moving. The wind had picked up again to a growl, and the air was bitingly cold. As he trudged through the sticky mire, he saw over his shoulder the shadow of Wake, soft in the growing dusk, on the gallery of the light tower. On his way back, the light flickered into a hot ember and then to a searing flame, shunning the sun still peeking over the dark waves.

Back in the sitting room he half in mockery, half in hopes of pleasing, swept the ash from the grate and stoked the fire. Winslow settled on the floor, legs stretched out and back leaning against the couch. He was tearing at the strands of rope when Wake entered bottle in hand.

Tucked under his arm was a net, and when he sat he spread it over his lap, making as if to mend it. After a few minutes of clumsy knots, it became clear that he was drunk, his humor seemingly improved. Winslow relaxed at this, and Wake launched into an old yarn about his days at sea.

“...It was a big downeaster, a tremendous square-rigged ship. I was jus’ a boy then, may-be younger than ye, an on tha’ ship sailed two years ta tha orient. I remember, tha first time I set foot on tha’ boat, I was entranced by the big sand glass and bell that signaled tha watch...caught the sun up in it just beautiful. An’ we had plum duff on Sundays, was a right good job.

“First we sailed ta Cape Verde, an’ on around tha Cape of Good Hope, an’ nearly melted as soft as wax in tha heat. Stopped in Batavia fer sugar an’ coffee; in a port off of Calcutta fer cotton. Over thar, the air is so thick with heat it stops in yer lungs, and breathin’ is extra work, nothin’ like tha cold here. Everything is alive, every shore screamed so many colors a’ green, all verdant and glistening through tha haze...Mostly tha water though, tha water was so alive you could feel it’s pulse…

“Aye, we ran quick-like along tha roaring forties, all tha way ta a Burmese port. An’ it was so strange an’ wondrous, with the wild jungle in tha distance an’ stories of cats as big as bears, that could swallow you whole an’ roared in a demon tongue. We were not there long, seemed but only a short while, and then we set out again, fighting tha wind all tha’ way back home.”

When he finished, he regarded Winslow, and with almost parental concern, words running together, ordered, “Winslow, quit tearin a’ tha rope, yer going ta ruin yer fingers, and get yerself up ta bed. To-morrow do better.”

“Aye Sir, thank ye,” Winslow flexed his hands and found himself thanking the wickie to his own half-awake surprise. As he disappeared up the stairs, he tried to separate his disdain and admiration to weigh them against each other, but in his weariness found them too mixed up to see. 

He undressed for the night. In his trunk, his letter was creased and folded inside-out. Winslow was too tired to notice. When he lay down to sleep his thoughts were like a twisted mess of vine, rearing up and growing and dying all at once.

Under Winslow, Wake sat with the net. He stood and stretched, and found his glasses. When he went to the pantry, he set the bottle, almost untouched, back on the shelf. The light needed tending.


	4. Building Character

For the next two days, they avoided each other like repelling magnets, the only words between them being a barrage of criticisms from Wake and a handful of “Aye, sir”’s from Winslow. When the old man was sober, he was dreadful. Instead of sitting in the parlor after supper, Winslow took to disappearing up to the bedchambers with the volume of Byron and a gas lamp. Wake didn’t object, but once made an offhand comment, “Didn’t take ye for a readin’ man.” It felt like beratement.

When the vitriol between them neutralized, Winslow, thinking of a sleek brown head and pale shoulders emerging from the bubbling surf, tentatively asked at dinner if he might use the double-hulled boat to fish off of the cove.

Wake squinted, and then all at once burst into laughter. “An let ye die out thar on tha surf? Ye haven’t sailed a day in yer life, an’ yer a miserable fisherman, by Neptune,” He shoveled cooked peas into his mouth and chewed loudly, “But if ye like, I’ll bring ye out on tha sea to-morrow. Then ye can go by yerself.” Winslow, who had been staring at the grain of the table in defeated anger, looked up in surprise. “Thank ye, sir.”

“Aye. But do me a favor, boy. No more fightin’ with tha gulls. Bad luck, that is.” And suddenly, Winslow was reduced to foolishness.

* * * *

When the dawn spilled into the sky and the swirling light shuddered off, Wake’s voice rumbled up the stairs, rousing Winslow to life. They met at the boathouse, where Wake, with tired hollows under his eyes, showed him all manner of tackle and ropes, raving about how to set weirs and scull and read the tide. He was pleasant enough, and held his tongue as Winslow launched the boat, offering only mild instructions. 

Winslow took up the oars, the hems of his pants wet with brine, and Wake ordered them out past the rocks of the bay. The water turned dark, fathoms deep, alight with the impression of dark blood skinned over by clear upper waters.

When they stopped, Winslow was slicked with cooling sweat, and the line of the island seemed impossibly far away, the air dizzy with silence. The only movement was the steady rocking of the waves; the only life in sight a flock of dovekies than dipped into the water to float buoyantly on the horizon. Wake cast down hand lines, baited with supper scraps, and gave them to Winslow. The quiet was comfortable, despite them both of the understanding the water wasn’t Ephraim’s domain.

Wake sat with his chin in hand, elbow balanced on his knee. He looked like he was going to fall into sleep at any moment, faintly smiling into the waves behind stupor of drowsiness. Winslow was leaned far over aft, looking down into the water, watching the ropes disappear into the dark. His attention drifted around slowly, and when he came back to himself he thought he felt eyes on him. 

When he looked up, he caught Wake’s stare, and quickly turned back to the ropes. The silence grew into something uncomfortable, until Wake broke it. “Tha sea will do ya good. Builds character.” Winslow opened his mouth to respond with a stilted, “Aye, sir”, which he had been using to cut many conversations short, but was saved from this by a sudden tugging on the line.

“Pull it up, lad!” He did as he was told with a few encouragements from Wake, until a fish was heaving strangely in the bottom of the boat. Winslow looked at it with surprise as it flung its muscled body, mouth agape. He was under the impression that fish were rough creatures, hardened by the sea, and had only seen their bulging faces dead in the market, or their pale bodies flayed and dried. The cod in front of him looked soft, with fine scales and a distended white stomach like a toad. It was hard to believe that this odd, fleshy thing had come from the black of the sea instead of some warm muddy place, more temperate and hospitable.

Wake let out a barking laugh, “Good boy. Didn’t think ye had it in you, but ye’ll be a fine fisherman yet, Winslow.” Winslow joined him in laughter, his bit back and startled. When he rowed them back to shore, the boat weighed down by three other fish, it was with a startling comfort and ease in Wake’s company. 

When they landed back on the shore, Wake, who was now bordering on irritability, his limp pronounced by fatigue, ordered Winslow to wrap the fish and store them in the root cellar, and then retired to bed. He did the rest of his work dutifully, finding himself oddly eager to please, which confused him. A few times while sweeping and polishing and sorting he was sparked with anger when thinking of Wake’s harsh voice and sputtering laughter at his expense, but when turning it over in his mind felt as if he was looking at something deep in the past of someone else's life; an almost isolated moment of fault. He forgave Wake sickeningly easy.

When Wake emerged from the dark heaven of the bedchamber and set about making their meal, he asked Winslow to bring up the catch from the root cellar. Entering into the space felt to Winslow like disturbing a grave, the air pregnant with the smell of the earth, but he brought them back to the upper-word; the comfortable warmth of the kitchen. 

They were flaccid and heavy when he presented them to Wake. The old man scoffed, “They ‘ave to be cleaned before we eat ‘em, lad.” 

Winslow took from wakes outstretched hand the wooden handle of the knife. He held it tightly, wearing his slight confusion on his face. The old man saw it, and made a show of taking the knife back from him. “Ye ‘ave never cleaned an animal?” His voice was colored with accusation.

“Jus’ deer an’ rabbits. Never a fish.”

“It ain’t much different. Ye’ll learn.” Wake ran the blade thought the spongy white meat, severing the head at the gills, letting the entrail spill out like dewey gems. He showed Winslow the cut he made along the knobby ridge of spine, the delicate action of pulling the meat from the bones like filmy paper. It seemed strange in Wake’s old hands.

Winslow copies under the wickie’s keen eye: defensively reaching for the knife, fumbling it along the back, cuts sloppy and rigid. The head was messily removed and the pulpy organs pooled in a dark wet mirror on the counter. Wake let out a grunt of satisfaction? Dissatisfaction? and turned away.

The next fish was hesitantly cleaner; the one after almost as perfectly dismembered as Wake’s. The food made from it was plain—the white meat cooked in a hot oiled pan, the peas boiled into mush—but it was filling, a small reward for the work. After eating, Wake moved to the stove to make stock of the bones; Winslow to the sink to do the washing. When Ephraim went to bed that night, it was with the weariness given by sun and fresh air. His sleep was dreamless.

As the horizon cracked open to reveal the yolk of sun, Winslow marched to the boathouse. The track was drying now from the days of clear weather, the air cold and brittle as a glass pane, but was still as soft as marrow underfoot. When he launched the boat, he couldn’t help the bubble of excitement rising in his chest. 

He had just left the store shed, where he was habitually wandering for relief. He would stand in the dark among the oil barrels and unbutton his trousers, feel under the waistband of his underclothes, shamefully thinking of pale breasts and ropey muscle. When he left it was with a measure of embarrassment, but he was alone. His red cheeks could be from the wind, anyway.

He didn’t stray far, kept the line of gulls that danced on the sand close over his shoulder. From the gently rocking cradle of the boat, he cast down the lines, absently twisting it over in one hand, the bone figure held tight in the other. He was mildly disappointed by his lack of dreams, and often tried to conjure her in front of him. He envisioned a pale, long-fingered hand latching on to the side of the boat, two muscled arms pulling up to reveal her face, her mouth, her eyes: two limpid pools of dark color, tearing up with pearls from the brine-

-but nothing came of it. He was still alone and wanting, feeling the scales of the figure over in his hand. He remained like that, occasionally looking at the island, or at the gulls that pinwheeled overhead. He stuck his tongue out at him in spite, and then sat feeling foolish.

A harsh tug on the rope drew him out of his lethargy, and he met it eagerly. He hauled in the line as hard as he could, the figure slipped into his pocket. The tugging was horrible, the rough weave of the rope tearing at his fingers. After struggling for what seemed like forever, he pulled over the edge of the boat a large fish, silver and writhing. It was leaking blood on the wood hull, and in a moment of triumph Winslow leaned over to inspect it, panting, hand outstretched to remove the hook from its blubbery mouth.

He almost instantly recoiled from the thing, it’s silver scale pineconed off its body, and it’s mouth, gasping, was entirely too human. The gills eyes were deep-set, but with the pupils of a man, and its nose? Snout? flared as it fought for air. He reached out to strike it dead, but couldn't bring himself to get closer. He sat in tremors watching the thing suffocate, staring as its horrible silver-skinned face. When it was finally dead, he clumsily used an oar to push it back into the sea, handline and all, and then rowed to shore in disgust.

His heart was still pounding in his chest by the time he got the boat lynched in. He stood under a pine for a smoke, sweating. His hands shook as he brought the cigarette to his mouth. 

He felt rattled for the rest of the day as he scrubbed and swept, working hard to convince himself that it was just some strange deep-sea creature, one that Wake would have brought in and gutted without thought, alien to only him.

* * * *

After dinner when Wake was pleasantly drunk, he sat Winslow down in front of him and looped between his hands a skein of white wool, glowing in the firelight. The old man wound it into a ball, and from his crossed-legged seat on the floor, Winslow asked: “What’s tha strangest thing you’ve seen at sea?” He was looking absently into the fire. 

Wake looked down through the thick crystal of his glasses, and then solemnly said, “...A huge eye, tha’ looked up through the waves right a’ me.”

“Surely not!”

“Aye, on dogwatch aboard tha _ Rover _. Told tha man who came to relieve me next shift, but he didn't believe a word of it. Must have thought me a liar,” a pause, and then “T’was tha size of a dolphin, and saw me, all a-glitter with blues and greens. Jus’ like a bruise, or a feather from a peacock's tail.

Ephraim looked up at him in wonder, thinking in stunned terror that he had disturbed some great silver monster; a swimming drop of mercury. He was consumed with an unshakable feeling that he would be punished for it.

Wake wound the last of the bit of yarn, and then wheezed out that dry laugh of his, throwing back his head in the heat of it. “I’m foolin’ ye, boy. Tha strangest thing I thought I saw was a gray sky turned yellow in a storm, an’ I’ve seen it a thousand times since. No, nothin’ is as plain an’ honest as tha sea.”

Winslow forced out a laugh of his own, but it sounded strangled, like it had caught on his teeth. “Aye, you fooled me.” His stomach soured.

“An’ tha strangest thing in those northern forests?” Winslow winced internally and bared his teeth in a smile.

“Jus’ a deer big an’ fat as a horse. But good John Pratt caught at least, oh, four more that season. Nothin’ horrible strange up there either.” Winslow left the old man nursing his second bottle to go up to bed. He lay awake most of the night.


	5. Hellish Thing

_ And I had done a hellish thing, _

_ And it would work ‘em woe: _

_ For all averred, I had killed the bird _

_ That made the breeze to blow. _

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Marine

When he slept it was restlessly. A hot wind blew around him, the island bright as the sea in sunlight. Birds dotted the sky, but they hung frozen. The waves seemed frozen too, like they were sculpted from soft clay. 

The heat was searing. Melting, even . He was surprised to see that the walls of the house were not running in rivulets; that the birds in the sky were not dripping like wax. He opened the door of the house and pulled off his wool coat, damp with sweat.

Inside was dark and stifling. In the dim sitting room the air was rippling dizzyingly with heat, feeling very much like the engine room of steam train he had shoveled coal on. Breathing was like drawing lead into his lungs, painful and weighted. The house was empty. He stood, listening for Wake moving upstairs, but it was silent. He could only hear his own breath, heaving in and out. 

The hallway leading to the light tower was hot enough to drive him to tear off his shirt, and by the time he reached the iron stairs he had unlaced his boots and left them on the floor with his trousers, like skin from a snake. He could sense that this was his chance, that he needed to seize it, and so was desperately pushing onwards.

When he raised his hand to grasp the railing, it sparked a glittering pain in his hand. He kept stumbling in the dark, crawling up the steps like a child or an animal, blisters swelling on his knees and elbows and palms from the ironwork’s heated touch. Above him, the wind was sighing through the grate like the breath of some animal.

When he finally reached the grate he found it open, rattling in the breeze, but as he tried to pull his swollen body through it that damn wind, hot and dry, flung him down. The falling woke him up.

* * * *

The days passed slowly, but with a constant rhythm that gave some hope. Ephraim washed the floors, and washed them again after being reprimanded. He painted the boathouse, and painted it again when told his work was unsuitable for even the ramshackle island. He hauled in traps, forced down foul supper after foul supper, shamefully crept to and from the shed. Twice he looked up at the circular pulse; the rotating shaft of light, and thought he saw the old man’s outline against it, his skin pallid. The shadow Wake cast over the island, wavering where it fell on the water, was more sea-birthed god — an old neptune — than weathered light tender. The vision was unsettling, hitting him somewhere in the gut. However much he despised the man, he liked him in equal measure, and the confusion made it difficult to be close to him. He stopped looking at the light. He stopped looking at Wake. 

At night he ate and then crept upstairs, or went down to sit by the water. Under the stars, the house looked as palatial as it could, imperfections masked by the night. Sometimes in the rosy dusk, it looked almost cozy: a picture from a storybook, a white house set against the mirrory water, starkly human against the rock and sand.

* * * 

Winslow once made the mistake of asking after the light. It happened at shift change, when Wake came shuddering up the stairs, when Winslows asked in a voice heavy with exhaustion if he would ever work the night shift. He wasn’t expecting the strike, but it came, a hard, open-handed slap to his cheekbone. The old man had quickly closed the distance between them, and stood breathing hard next to the bed. The young man was still in his pajamas, half cloaked by blankets. They both looked a little shocked, each red-faced and wide-eyed. Wake’s anger melted as fast as it had grown, and he slumped down on his own thin mattress with only, “Tha’s not yer shift. Yer not ready for it.”

Another day, after watching Winslow flex his dry, cracked hands by the fire, he woke him by tossing a pair of woolen mittens onto his pillow. “Ye young lads don’t have any sense,” was muttered under his breath, almost unintelligible as he limped to his side of the room and stripped down to his underclothes. Winslow said nothing, but wore them from then on. 

Just as soon, they had a spat over dinner when Ephraim asked after the logbook. The desk was still locked, the key kept somewhere in the depths of Wake’s pocket. 

“Logbook’s kept by tha first keeper. Always has been.” He was shoveling food into his mouth, spraying out crumbs as he talked.

“But-”

“Nothin’ to dispute about it.”

“-The manual says that it should be kept by both; that I should record the work I’ve done, too.”

Wake slammed his cup down, drink sloshing up over the rim. “Yer forgetting whose in charge, Winslow. An’ yet a dullard for it. Damn the handbook! Yer ta listen ta me.” The whites of his eyes burned red from the glow of the taper, and his hand was curled into a menacing fist. The hand around his fork shook.

That ended it. They kept spinning around each other, avoiding and reaching out and falling back, until everything was blurry between them. Was Wake cruel? Was Winslow incompetent? Neither could tell. Looking at Wake across the room was like looking through water. He was quivering and shaking and leaking in and out of himself.

* * * *

Wake was often drunk, which helped to soothe his ire. He would stagger up the stairs and fall into bed, groaning from the depths of some perpetual drunkenness, and emerge a twilight creature eager for drink. Their shared meals, each time both dinner and breakfast; a start and an end, were colored by silence as they retreated into themselves. If they did talk, it was when Wake assumed a non-threatening picture of drunkenness, or when Winslow made a mistake. What a painful tangle of thorns to navigate! It was quietly understood that they were not the same; that there was a unbreachable difference between them. Both seemed unable to stop reaching out and falling.

Once or twice when Winslow was hauling wheelbarrows of coal or fetching something from the boathouse, he lost the sea. He could hear its pounding, but the island was sitting in an endless mudflat, stretching out to the horizon. There were dark shapes marring the long stretch of wet sand; tangles of seaweed and distant shapes lying bloated in the sun. He would stop, watching in cold horror, and in a blink would be once again surrounded by wine-dark rushing water.

This continued to happen. He would be shingling the roof in the still air, and in a wet rush a burst of haggard-faced storm wind would shake him, disappearing into the sky moments later. Grotesque contortions of the old man trailed him like hunting dogs. He started to grow uneasy when outside, would cast desperte looks over his shoulder, startling at the slightest sound. Often he would see a shifting film in front of him, rippling the cistern he was stirring or the ground he was walking on. He would rub his eyes and it would leave him.

The days began to take on a disorienting tint. The soft, buttery-hued dawns of his waking started to melt into a muddy tumult of colors. He would stumble on the stairs and momentarily forget where he was. One day when he dressed, he looked out the crown-glass window only to see a thousand dark tree trunks. Wake watched his face crumple in on itself, but said nothing. When four weeks were over, he would have a new assistant. Ephraim wasn’t fit for this work. The salt air was breaking him apart, bashing him to pieces against the rock.

* * * 

When Ephraim reached out and grasp the plumey neck of the seabird, he heard somewhere in the back of his head Wake’s warning, and saw in his inner eye his fingers opening. He watched, distantly, as the bird wrenched itself into the sky. 

But his fingers gripped tighter, and hollow bones and silky muscle were beat against the rough concrete until his hand was filled with limp weight and harsh angles of feather and sticky blood. It registered late. When the thing was dead, he brought it down to the boat house and buried it in the silty soil there. The rest of the day was normal. There was nothing; no sense of dread, no mounting paranoia. 

Until there was. During dinner his stomach twisted. His mouth was cotton dry. He couldn’t choke down the lobster. Wake, who had been recounting some old sea journey, puffed out a cloud of bitter smoke and frowned. “Something the matter with ye?”  
“No, sir.” It came out raspy. His hands shook as he tried to bring food to his mouth.

“Ye lying to me, boy?”

“No.”

Wake raised his eyebrows and stood with a harumph, leaving Ephraim alone in the room with dirty dishes and thick panic. He brought his bottle of drink with him.

After washing, Winslow tried to slink upstairs, but Wake called out to him. He winced and stood in the doorway to the sitting room. 

“Yes, sir?”

“Come sit, boy.” He was bathed red in the firelight. The glass bottle near his foot was empty. He hesitated, but did as he was told, perching stiffly in a chair drawn up next to Wake’s.

“Sir?”

“What do ye, a boy as pretty as a picture, really want here? With being a wickie?” The old man had his eyes half-closed, leaned back in his rocking chair. A ripped net sat abandoned next to his bottle. 

A deep chill enveloped Winslow. Sweat was dripping down his back; he was damp with it all over. Why did the old man care? His thoughts flashed to his letter, to the woods, to a blunt axe handle connecting with the back of a blond head. He didn’t know what to say, wasn’t even thinking, just sitting there hoping that soon it would be over. 

He must have taken too long to react, because Wake blessedly launched into one of his drunken tirades, word loosely streaming out, “I remember when I started out. As an assistant keeper, mind ye. That was, oh, 68’? On account of my bad leg, I couldn't sail no more. Useless, I was. Came here mourning tha sea, but she didn’t leave me. Eventually, I realized I was still tha same, and so was tha sea. ‘Nd tha light, I’m damn-well wedded to this ‘ere light. Been a finer wife to me than any a live-blooded woman,” he paused mournfully, “Suppose ‘tis desperation, tha’ makes the work worth it. I did’t ‘ave any other option. But you, Winslow, ye’ll find something. Can tell tha’ light tending ain’t for ye, but yer still just a young lad; got yer whole life ahead of ye,” he clapped Winslow on the shoulder, making him jump. 

“Yes, sir. I suppose just haven’t found a job that suits me.” His voice was hoarse.

“On tha run?” Wake bit the stem of his pipe. Ephraim couldn’t tell if he was being mocked, or if he had been found out, but he felt his heart twist and writhe.

“No sir—I don’t—Now, listen here, I’m just trying to make a living, just like any-”

Wake coughed up a cloud of smoke and bellowed a laugh. “Just joshing with ye, lad.”

Wake laughed again, quieter this time, and stood with a groan to piss. Ephraim didn’t have anything in front of him, but he could find it. After all, it was Ephraim who had prospects, not old Tom. 

When Winslow excused himself and slipped upstairs, Wake sat in silence, staring hard into the fire. He muttered something under his breath, mouth pulled taught in a frown. Winslow was hiding something, had some black mark on his soul, that much he knew. But company was company, and he’d be lying to say the boy wasn’t easy on the eyes. 


	6. Hudson Bay Outfit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB1ykAom4aA  
link to the song cos it low-key bops xoxo

Hudson Bay Outfit

_ So merry, so merry, so merry are we _

_ No mortal on earth is as happy as we. _

_ Hi derry, ho derry, Hi derry down, _

_ Give a shanty boy whiskey and his head will spin ’round _

Sam Campshall -The Shantyboy’s Alphabet

He hadn’t planned on it, but when he saw the man standing there, right over the water, he was struck by the thought that it wouldn’t be hard to do. The axe handle was smooth and heavy in his hands. So he did it. And it wasn’t that it felt good, exactly, it was just that at first didn’t feel guilty. The man had slipped on the wet lichen-covered rock when he brought the handle down over his head, not hard enough to render him unconscious, and sputtered and flailed in the icy current. Tom sat down and lit a cigarette. He smoked as the current carried Winslow further and further out.

“Damn you, Tommy! You dog!” The logs were coming now. It wasn’t uncommon for a man to slip and fall into the water to be crushed, was it? The forest around him was empty and still, and soon the blonde disappeared under the water. He didn’t come up again.

When he made his way back to camp, peavey hook slung over his shoulder, Tom felt fine. Until one of the boys in the mess hall brought it up. “Hey, Tom, where's that fella Winslow?” 

“Winslow? We split on the way back to camp. ‘Haven't seen him since.”

“Really? Huh. Thought you two were as thick as thieves.”

They had been, for a time. Tom had been working the lumber camp for a year when Winslow showed up and latched onto him like a thistle. He must have been a few years younger, because he was scrawny as the dogs that sometimes hung around. When he finally grew himself a mustache, he would walk around camp with his nose in the air, fancying himself a man. They all got a good laugh out of it.

The boy who asked, some kid out of Vermont who mostly just swept cabins and helped pitch tents, ran off into the crowd. In the distance, Tom heard him ask, “John! Winslow back yet? Gotta letter from his folks out in Alberta.”

That night the bunk below him was empty. The wind howled outside, working its fingers through the chinks in the wood and into his heart. His head started to hurt, then his stomach. When he wandered out to the edge of camp to wretch until the country ham he had for supper came up, along with what felt like everything else he had ever eaten, he kept thinking he saw a towhead looking at him through the leaves. 

It didn’t stop. “Tommy! You seen Winslow?”

“Don’t know, but if you see him let me know. I’m going to skin his hide when we find him, just disappearing like that.” The effort was exhausting.

He fend off the questions for a few weeks, but he started to feel eyes on him wherever he went, and the rumors started to spring up faster than weeds. He started hacking at trees like they were poor old John Mccan after he asked one too many questions. The guilt started to settle in his bones. He still didn’t know why he did it.

He was thankful when he was paired up with Homer, who worked a two horse team and never said nothing to nobody, but the rumors kept swelling until you couldn’t walk through camp without hearing whispers of a crime done in the woods. He was growing more ornery by the day. Lashing out, drinking more, picking fights. Once at breakfast he lunged at Elias with so much spitting fury that it took two men to haul him off. When he disappeared one night, slipping off with all of Winslow's papers and clothes, it didn’t really surprise anyone.

The very last letter that Tom had sent to his folks had shipped a month ago, and the reply had come the day before he melted into the cold night. 

Thomas Howard, 

Your sister and I are doing fine, and were happy to hear that you are in good health, though your last letter was cause for some concern. I hope you understand that I was startled, to say the least, to hear about the accident. I’m sure that it was difficult, but you needn’t worry so. Any man, when put in your position, would struggle to know what to do. The way you described it, it sounded as if there was nothing to be done. Your sister hasn’t hear a word of it; it would shock her so. I am sure your position with the Hudson Bay company is safe (and thank God for that! I remember when you were shoveling coal, your letters always arrived black as sin about the edges!) after all, didn’t a man slip and crack his skull just last spring? It’s not something that you can blame another person for, when an accident like that happens. If something does happen, just remember there is always a place for you at home, Tom. We are still praying for you every day. Your sister’s already praying that you will come home this Christmas.

Henry Jacob Howard

The letter felt dirty. Tom felt dirty for letting himself be soothed by it. He kept it close just the same.

For a while he was slipping town to town, doing grunt work mending fences and raising barns and digging wells. He was in some little coastal town in New Hampshire, feeling hollow, when someone first mentioned a lighthouse. It was some old fisherman, drunk and talking loudly at the bar, that clued him to it.

“Up at Wood Island, ye hear of it?” The bartender he was yelling at was doing his best to placate him, letting “oh, sure”’s and “don’t ya say?”’s slip out every few beats in the conversation.

“Head they need a new assistant keeper. Said tha old one went mad. Easy thing ta do, in a place like that. Nothin’ but tha light an’ tha gulls.”

And just like that he knew his fate. Surely, no one would be looking for Ephraim Winslow out at sea. Besides, Thomas Harding had no prospects anymore, not one. He was out looking for the USLHS office by the end of the week, was hired almost on the spot, and was aboard a steamship chugging its way out to a safe Atlantic nowhere, where the guilt couldn’t find him. 

His mind was full of it. Sleep didn’t come, not with all the visions of Ephraim's bleeding skull, of his sharp, high laugh, of his warm hands in winter. Once, when Ephraim just started out, he got lost in the snow on the way pack from an outpost set up to cut white pine, and who did they sent to get him? Tommy of course. The two were closer than brothers. 

When Wake came up to rouse him for his shift, he could feel the jolt of a warm hand in his, and could hear the crisp breaking of the snow on the way back to camp.


	7. Homeward Bound

“Winds changed.” Wake stood with clenched fists at the foot of Winslows’ bed, his mouth twisted into a tight frown under the froth of his beard. The cold dawn light hardly flowed through the window. There were clouds on the horizon.

“Huh?” Winslow jerked upright, heart pinned to the roof of his mouth, words choked around it. For a moment he confused Wake’s white hair with Winslow’s bone-pale curls.

“Storms rollin’ in. Won’t start till after relief comes, if we’re lucky.” When he looked Winslow in the face he softened a bit, “Cheer up, lad. Yer almost home.” He stripped down to his underclothes and crawled into bed. As Winslow was leaving, he called out, “Foghorn will need runnin’. Tha mist be comin’ in.”

***

Breakfast tasted better. The air felt fresh, no longer the fetid, briny breath of some sea horror, and when he hauled coal up to the signal house, he did it gladly and in good spirits. He didn’t even mind that Wake roused early and was keeping a keen eye on him while he worked. The gulls kept to themselves out on the greying horizon. He was going back to the mainland tomorrow; already planned on taking the first west-bound train. Word of Tom Howard hadn’t seeped all the way to that far coast. Ephraim Winslow would find fortune yet.

Then he nervously thought about the papers. He had them with his things, tucked between the pages of his neglected king james? The letter was the only thing gone, any trace of it swept out with that mornings ashes. He bitterly thought of the mussed paper, of the misplaced creases. The old man had done it, he was sure. No one else around to blame. But he had looked at Wakes things, sought out his logbook and his handbook. Was he any better? He felt mildly sick at the thought, because of course he wasn’t. For all he hated the man, he didn’t have the same blood on his hands. 

Ephraim smoothed away this thought with the fresh memory of watching the paper burn in the grate. Now there was only proof. He was Ephraim Winslow. Didn’t know a thing about any Tom Howard. The thought was good enough to make him laugh, which did nothing to ease the guilt.

Wake was right, the fog was rising early, coming up off the tide in sheets. By noon the sky was as dark as twilight. Wake found him again down by the boathouse, scrubbing down the little rowboat and whistling tunelessly.

“Storm’s in. Might break at any second; better start tha foghorn ta screaming.” He looked as nervous as Winslow had ever seen him, standing there in just his vest, red-faced in the cold. Winslow, for a moment, thought he looked like a scared animal, like a kicked dog, and had to bite back laughter. He was in too good a mood. Even if the old man knew who he was, for all his pomp, he was just a sea-beaten nobody. “An’ ye better nail up the signal house windows,” Wake clipped his sentence short with a sharp nod and a wary, piercing look sent up to heaven.

“Aye Sir, I’ll get straight to it.” He rolled down his shirtsleeves and threw the rag into a crate. Wake was muttering something under his breath. “Sir?”

“I said they might not make it in, what with tha storm.” He made a gesture with his hand, including the sea and sky and ground in it. 

“Relief, you mean?”

“Ayuh. One yeah they didn’t get in for months from a storm tha’ didn’t die. Ship couldn’t make the landing.”

“Oh.” It came out breathless, and he couldn’t help but think this was some fault of the old man, that the weather was another one of his tortures. The old sailor lit within him that streak of anger, of mad and senseless violence, that he had tried so hard to leave behind in the cold, and it made him fiercely hateful. Which only worked to stoke his guilt.

“Don’t be so long-faced, Winslow. Could happen yet, and our stores are fat and full,” he looked Winslow in the face, but the boy wouldn’t meet his eyes, “Ye’ll be gone tomorrow, don’t start grudgen me now.” He reached out and laid a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, heavy hand resting on bone sheathed in muscle sheathed in skin.

The signal house was a familiar hell. He shoveled, and shoveled, and stuffed his hears to deaden the harpy-wail of the trumpet, but he felt stuck in time, like he had just arrived. Maybe the tender ship would make it, and the weather was just some passing ornery cloud. Maybe the old man liked to see him scared. His mind flared red with the pulse of the coal stove, the black soot stirring on the floor like paper-ash on morning wind.

***

On the shore, in a small upstairs office in an otherwise empty building, a USLHS director frantically typed up telegraphs, spirals of punched paper coiling on his desk in ribbons, each delivered by a harrowed secretary that was sent out every five minutes to send another.

“Franics! Tell O’Leary that it’s impossible to put it off—the man signed a contract! A breach on our part would be disgustingly unprofessional. Yes, get that into baudot. Tell that old sailor that the storm will be gone by tomorrow. Hell, it came from nowhere and will pass just as quickly. And send another to head office, the director will have my head for Sunday roast if we don’t get out there, not after what happened just last month.”

“Yes, sir. Right. And if O’Leary refuses? He might not force his crew to sail. I’ve heard storms linger out there.”

Henry slammed a meaty fist down next to a pile of papers, rattling a saucer and upsetting an inkwell. 

“God! Francis, get a rag. Damn! All that paperwork,” he pulled at his collar and loosened his tie. An abandoned cigar was searing a circle into the lacquered mahogany. “O’leary will sail. The man is part fish. Anyway, they have enough supplies if he can’t. They have what they can pull from the sea, and...they have a cistern? Yes, had to order them more chalk last month,” He puffed on the cigar while Francis scribbled something in shorthand with one hand and frantically scrubbed at the mess with another, “I’d hate to be out there myself. Just dreadful. Well, maybe not. The wife’s been hounding me lately...No, the sea is a dreadful thing; you can’t trust it. That’s why I’m in an office.” He looked thoughtfully out the window and then checked his watch.

“Sir, did you hire that man? The keeper? I know we met the new assistant, and the one before. Has anyone lasted long at Wood Island besides that old man? He must be a lunati-”

“Wake’s been out there for the better part of, oh, twenty years. Can’t remember if he’s ever been back on leave. Despite his eccentricities, we can’t get rid of him. Never bothers with letters, requests...Personally, I think it's just you young folk, getting in to things that you can’t handle.” Henry was standing, cigar spilling ash over the contents of the drawer he was hovering over. 

“Right. Ok, I’ll run the messages to be sent.” Francis grabbed his coat and disappear out the door in a flurry of notepaper and tweed.

“Francis!  _ Francis!” _ Henry looked up, but his assistant was gone. He would have to ask him to check the attic storage for the Wood Island records. Odd; they had been out not long ago, when they had to write up a report for leave of the last assistant keeper. ***

Wake started the light up early, and by dinner they were both exhausted. The rain and wind had started, creaking through the house and beating against it from all sides. Winslow was hesitantly indulging in a good mood; had convinced himself again that relief would make it through the storm. Wake the gale was only just beginning; could feel the ache of it in his old joints.

Winslow sat first; Wake had served the food but was digging for something in the pantry. With a grunt and a heave he brought down a wooden crate, full of bottles that rattled like ice in the lamplight. “Now, I know ye have refused ta drink. But it being your last night here, ye might as well. I never knew of an inspector who wouldn’t turn a blind eye ta it. An’ I won’t take ‘no’ fer an answer. It never did a body any harm, ta have a drink now an’ then.”

Winslow shifted uncomfortably in his seat; he could feel a refusal on his tongue, but Wake had already begun to pour out the stuff. To hell with it. Wake was right, a drink never hurt anyone, and with some luck he would be gone tomorrow, the island and the old man forever behind him. Might as well celebrate. He nodded and raised his cup with the old man, “Should pale death...make the ocean caves our bed, uhm... To getting off this sorry rock,” he raised his cup higher. Drink spilled out onto the table.

Wake let out his sand-paper laugh, “There ye go, Winslow. An’ a toast to ye, tha god fearin’ man. Let ‘im settle down with none to tell ‘em “what for,” that his cinders always stay burnin’, and let fear never abandon ‘im.”

Winslow threw back his cup of grog, some kind of home-made liquid that burned worse than cooking sherry. The metallic taste of the tin cup rang in his mouth. The two kept going in an unsaid competition until Winslow’s head rippled in time with his heart and his thoughts came slow and thick, sticking to his teeth like taffy. They both kept talking nonsense, hunched close, each voicing some secret they didn’t feel coming out. They were wild with it, but didn’t stop until standing was difficult and the floor was running into the ceiling. The stairs were an almost insurmountable challenge. Winslow crawled up them on his hands and knees. Outside the rain was mounting, drumming into the roof harder than his heart thrashed against his ribs. He was swayed and staggered in tune with the invisible rhythm of drunkenness.

* * * 

The attic was full of boxes of records of ships and lighthouses, all damply melting into the dark. Francis had hauled all the boxes and files and parcels from the past four months into the office and, dismayed, dug wildly through the papers.

“If we can’t find the record for Wood Island, we can always call head office. They’ll kill me for it, but they have transcripts of everything.” Henry tucked papers that were decidedly not about Wood Island back into envelopes and folders.

“Funny. I thought we had all of the papers for Wood Island out just the other day. Remember? When we had to send the accident report? I thought I left it out for you?” Francis looked up from the floor, glasses lopsided. There was a smudge of ink on his right temple.

“I thought so, too.” He heaved a sigh and pawed through some sheaves of parchment. “Here,” Henry ripped a page from a notepad, “Get this sent to head office. We should get a response by morning. Come in early.”

***

The floor suddenly seemed a very comfortable place. He went down on his knees, and crawled to the foot of his bed, tearing his blanket from it. Behind him, Wake was laughing again, the sound cleaving his head in two. “Look a’ ye, crawling like a dog.”

“You’re no better, you old fool! You can’t keep the floor steady beneath you,” and it was true, Wake was swaying back and forth, fighting for balance. He laughed and sank to the floor, spilling drink over himself as he did. They fell back into silence, passing the bottle back and forth between them, until the old Wickie launched himself into a story. Winslow's head was thrown back against the lip of his bed. The ceiling was moving elastically over him, and it was dizzying to watch. Wakes voice sounded distant. 

“...and me father kept light, down off the coast of New Hampshire, and so I knew from when I was a boy tha’ it was tha job for me-”

“No…”

“Wot?”

“You said that you broke your leg while working as a sailor....’n that you started keeping light after you were no good on a ship any longer,” Winslow raised his head to look at the old man. 

“Bah!” He made a gesture with his hand like he was brushing the contradiction into the sky, “Yer confused. As mad as a dog.” 

“Then what ‘appened to your leg?”

“Born a gimp, I told ye..” Anger was creeping into his voice, his eyes narrowed slits glinting like coals in the dim haze of the oil lamp.

“Alright…”

“Wot?”

“I said alright...what were you saying?” Winslow pulled his blanket tighter around him. The side of his bed was jutting into his neck. He looked down at his feet and made a feeble attempt at unlacing his boots before resigning to them. He might be a liar, but the old man sounded no better. If they both were sinning the same, then maybe they could turn a blind eye. He felt muffled, like his mind was stuffed with the rags he used to block out the foghorn. 

“I was saying that I always knew I was ta keep light…”

****

Francis came through the office door a burst of panting breaths, smelling like rain and wet dirt. His hat was thrown onto a hook by the door as he held a ribbon of bunched paper in his outstretched hand, “Sir. They don't have anything on Wood Island. I have the telegraph here.”

“What?” Henry looked up from his newspaper. “Really? You must be reading it wrong. Give it here,” he tore the paper from Francis’ fingers and looked at the punched baudot.

“What?” He roared. “Nothing? I’ve sent countless reports! Hell, half of what I do is manage Wood Island!”

“I know, sir. I told them such, but look,” he pulled spools of paper from his jacket pockets, “They deny there even being a lighthouse out there. When I insisted, they thought me a fool. Told me that they have no  _ plans _ of building one out there.”

The two stared at each other in silence. Fistfulls of telegraphs fluttered to the ground. Henry's cigarette burnt itself to ash in his hand.

***

Dawn arrived, grey and frozen, and Ephraim woke to the feeling of being hot and cold and sickly. His ribs and spine were sore from the floor, the bone figure bruising against his hip. Wake was rousing next to him, stretching out with a groan. “S’ a mess in ‘ere. Best clean up and pack up, Winslow, if ye want to be ready for tha relief ship.”

“Ayuh,” he stifled a yawn and stood, the drink stale and painful in his blood.The rain was so thick in the air that he couldn't separate the outline of the rocks from the waves when he stood by the window. From the corner of his eye, he could see the blinking of the light, and in his mind could almost hear it revolving on it’s brass tracks. 

“Smells ‘o shit. Better bring out the chamber pots,” before Winslow could open his mouth in reply, he had thumped down the stairs, muttering some song, running it over with his rough voice, ugly and strained.

Ephraim reminded himself that in a few short hours he would be gone. He would be free of this place, of the old man, of his old life. When he packed his bedroll and folded his establishment issued clothes, he ran his fingers over the beaten bible and thought of Sunday hymns. He closed it and left it in his trunk. Wouldn’t be any good to drag old memories out west. He tried to breathe calmly as he slipped into his oilskins. Ephraim Winslow would make it off this island yet. He could leave Tom Howard and all his guilt out on the rocks to be swallowed by the sea.

When he got out into the gale his heart dropped. To make any headway he had to hunch against the wind, and the grey tide leapt up into the sky and crashed down on the sand with a ferocity that rattled his nerves. The _ Gull _ was a big ship, wrought from iron muscle. It would make it, certainly? The ground was slicked with rain, the rocks offering no better foothold than the wet lichen and ice sheets up north. His head pulsed with each blinding revolution of the light. The wind spit in his face and as he fought for purchase he slipped, sending both bedpans and their contents into the air for the wind to blow against him. Winslow gagged back to the house, his throat burning with bile and fear.

When he burst back into the living room, he was met by the bitter smell of tobacco smoke, and the old man settled comfortably at his desk. “Whats that look fer, lad? Ye better swab this mess before yer ship comes.” Winslow stood blankly for a few moments. He felt damned. “Get to it, boy, the lodgings are in grave condition.”

“Right. Of course, Sir.”

***

The floors were scrubbed and the shelves dusted. Wake had packed his pipe again, and had been smoking long enough that the room was clouded with it, shifting against the ticking of the clock. Ephraim was twisted in his seat, heart leaping at every black wave on the horizon, mistaking it for the stout outline of his savior. He twisted his gunnysack between his hands, nervously smoothing out the creases again and again. Wake was staring at him across the table, his face contorted into something that, for him, could read as close to pitying. “They ain’t making it out here in this storm, Winslow. Best to kill yer hopes now, and do it quick.”

When Ephraim turned to look at him hours later, face masked by the dark of the swelling twilight, Wake was disturbed by the unadulterated fear and anger in his voice, “They didn't come.” 


	8. Birth of Venus

When Wake brought out another crate of booze, Winslow didn’t protest. The storm raged on; it whipped the tired grass to upright attention and bowed the fir trees under its leaden weight. The two were up all hours, Wake keeping the light lit and the glass shades clean for any hapless ship out in the churning dark, with Winslow shoveling coal and passing out between meals in a drunken fit. The burning liquid helped to numb his mind against the torrential onslaught of fear. For Wake, the grog was an old friend; a familiar comfort.

Ephraim felt increasingly feverish. His breath and mind were stale with drink, and he felt encased in a film of sweat? Sin? Whatever it was, it oozed from his pores; felt like drying gore on his hands, smeared wet across his brow, clinging to his back and neck. When Wake slung open the door to the signal room and shouted over the din, Winslow startled, face etched with savage fear. The boy was mad. 

“The damps got to the provisions!” Wake looked into his face with wary concern. His beard was dripping rivulets onto the floor, and the hem of his coat was a waterfall in miniature. 

“What?” Ephraim's hands were black with coal dust, and his eyes were stinging from the smoke and heat. He pulled the rags from his ears and wiped his brow with his forearm.

“The damps got to the provisions! The salt cod ‘as gone to rot.”

“The drygoods?” Winslow pulled his shirt back on; felt too exposed without it, despite the heat. 

Wake pulled his shoulder up in an indecisive shrug,“Salvageable, but ye better haul in tha traps, lest ye want to sup on beans an’ rice.” He was about to turn and leave when he grumbled out, “Now will ye listen?”

“To what?” Winslow shifted, leaning his weight on the shovel, looking nervously over Wake’s shoulder into the storm.

“Been askin’ ye ta ration fer weeks…”

“Weeks? It’s been a day since we missed her; tender could be on its way as we speak?!”

“Nay, Winslow yer raving mad. ‘S been weeks.”

“Listen here, it’s been a day and you know it. We missed her when we was dead drunk, and you know it! I can take the dory out, we can-”

His speech was deflated by a pointed finger, “Don’t be losin’ yer head now, Winslow.”

“It ain’t funny!” He threw the shovel onto coal pile. The foghorn bellowed and he winced against it.  
“No, it ain’t. Just haul the traps in like yer bid so we will be saved from starving.” Wake turned and fled out into the storm. A string of complaints was thrown through the still-open doorway by the wind’s fist: “Insubordinate again… Tha’ raving dog… Stranded with a lunatic…”

In the rain, Winslow could see Wake moving around in the kitchen window, the warm yellow glow spilling through where a board had loosened. Some more sober part of himself made a note to get nails from the shed to fix it, but he staggered on towards the trap lines. The waves were tall and black, swallowing the gritty swathe of sand eagerly, throwing themselves against the rocky embankment of the swell of the island. It looked biblical, the white foam flying on the rough tongue of the wind and the far-off rumble of thunder growing to a steady earth-shaking growl.

The first trap was empty, the rough rope strung through his hands like his mother’s rosary. He couldn’t remember any prayers, but worked his mouth over the shape of the forgotten words, any not-word sounds he made masked by the weather. He felt split open, like a dog on it’s back, like the vice-jaws of the tempest was going to rip him open. He was shaking, a little. Water was running down his back and arms but there was nothing baptismal about it.

He crossed to the other side of the island to check the traps there, mind reeling and sputtering in fits of melting northern winters and broken bones and panting steam engines. He didn't look at the light: its steady, mocking glow burned in his peripheral. The ground was sloppy down by the boathouse, and if he looked carefully at the soil at the foot the tree he would see a deflated plume of feathers rupturing the earth. He wasn’t looking down, but instead out at the sea.

Before he could make it to the rocky lip of the island where the lobster trap was laid he, squinting against the salty bluster, noticed the outline of something? Someone? Lying supine on the rocks. His heart leapt and sank in equal measure: if it was someone from the tender ship, had they capsized in the storm? It was hard to see anything clearly—even though the fog had cleared, the rain was merciless and the thick clouds overhead stifled the midday sun to a dim gray.

He tripped twice as he picked his way across the rocks. The tide was high, and the waves lapped at his boots, slowly working their icy grip up to his ankles as he picked his way to the shape. It was a twisted mound of seaweed, dredged up by the storm. Something glinted from behind the limp fronds. Ephraim leaned over it, waverying a little from the waning throb of alcohol still in him. He brushed apart the ringlets.

And there she was, his vision. He gasped so hard he coughed on his own spit, and then was kneeling over her, hands on her face. Her tangled hair was soft as milkweed, but her face was cold. He brushed a calloused hand down her face, to her neck, down across her ample bosom, and found on her side great scored marks that flared like open wounds. Unease started to trickle in to the back of his mind, some memory of silvered scales and human eyes. And further down, below the hem of her forest green scales, a startlingly, fleshy distortion of a human vulva that was both grotesque and alluring. 

Just as he had paused in trepidation, hands caught in the air between her breasts and the button of his slacks, she was upright, screaming. It rippled through him like a shot, and then he was careening back, looking at her misplaced body writhing haloed by seaweed. Now he couldn’t tell if that horrible mocking sound was seething up out of his own sore throat, or if it was coming from the cold body on the shore, or if it was the bullish scream of the foghorn. Somewhere in the back of his mind flashed the image of he a lobster pot, he didn't try to stop the scream that ripped from his throat. A head, a human head, pale and bloated, was caught in it.

Suddenly it made sense. He was all exposed nerves; damp with sweat despite the chill. Lightening cracked on the horizon, and he started into a frantic run towards the boathouse at the sound. His whole body throbbed and vomit dribbled down his front.

The desperate scramble back to the house was a blur or rocks and grass and mud and trees, and by the time he flung open the door to the sitting room, dripping water and blood from his scraped hands.

“What’s yer screamin’ fer?” Wakes eyes tracked from Winslows wide eyes down to his scuffed hands. “Tha traps?” Winslow panted in and out, in and out. He was having trouble thinking. “Lad? Tha traps?”

“Uhm,” He shook his head. “Empty. I reset ‘em, but slipped on the rocks on the way back.” He looked down at his hands. The sting was starting to catch up to him.

“Humph. Shoulda started to ration, I told ye…” He shuffled towards the pantry. “Get ye somethin’ fer those hands..”

His mouth ached for another drink, but Wake didn’t offer any. He did pull from a shelf in the kitchen a cloth-bound medical handbook, sending a billowing cloud of dust into the air. He stood, flipping through the leaflet, whistling a little through his teeth. “Ah!” He tapped the page twice with a dirty fingernail. “Tincture o’ iodine.”

Wake didn’t say anything as he diluted the solution, or wiped clean the scrape against the tender junction between Winslow’s palm and thumb, or removed a piece of gravel from the outside of the flat of his open hand. Winslow didn’t either. He was still watching on some flickering motion-picture reel in the back of his head the woman? Monster? On the beach. The effigy in his pocket felt heavy.

“Thar. Winslow, ye can’t hold yer drink so ye best slow down with it, especially when yer working by the coal stove or tha water. I would tell ye that yer an idiot an’ a fool, but I think I’ve said it enough.” His face was tired. He looked mildly irritated, maybe concerned. He took the strips of gauze and left Winslow sitting at the kitchen table.

Ephraim watched Wakes shoulders work under his shirt as he moved things around at the stove. He couldn’t muster up the energy for hate. Mostly he resigned himself to exhaustion. The figure in his pocket was burning him more and more through the layers of his clothes.

He swallowed thickly, “Sir. I think the, um. I’m going out to see that the shed is closed, what with this weather and all...and get nails to fix the,” he gestured at the window, “boards.”

Wake squinted out from over his shoulder, “Don’t be falling again, lest ye do yerself worse harm than jus’ a scrape.”

“Aye sir.”

The shed was closed. It was dark, and he felt dull for not bringing a lantern out. He took from his pocket the bone figure. It looked the same, but felt distorted: no longer an object of desire, but of disgust. He was shamefully aware of all the time he had pleasured himself to the thought of her, and now could feel the burn of bile rising in his throat. He let the figure clatter to the floor, echoing into. He brought he bootheel down on it, once-twice-three times. It split apart, head from shoulders, and that was enough. On his way out he threw a few nails into his pocket and grabbed a hammer from a crate by the door. The leering oil cans had started to make him uneasy.

Through the gaps than ran like veins between the boards he could see the old man, his shoulders working under his shirt. He stood in the rain and watched Wake cooking, listening to his garbled voice sing some old shanty. Then he took the nails from his pocket and boarded up the window, the force of it rattling the glass. On the wall above Wake, the barometer needle shuddered from “rain” to “storm”.

  
  



	9. Bachennalia

They kept themselves pleasantly drunk, and let the days flow like water. Wake was up all hours, appearing to say something unintelligible to Winslow, make a vague and harmless threat, and then would disappear. Often he would stand on the beach as Winslow watched from a distance, yelling into the wind and spilling drink into the sea. Once he questioned Wake about it, and was met with anger. “Have ye forgotten god? Have ye no mind to pay tribute?” Winslow blinked and nodded, and fled the conversation. He was a mess, like his soul was spilling all over the island. Like his head had been bashed in against the rocks. 

He couldn’t remember how many times he had done it, but at the foot of the lighthouse, in the damp earth where Wake had commanded him to dig, he sat in the hole, looked up at the sky, and tried as hard as he could to beg for forgiveness. Wake looked on sympathetically, and didn’t interfere with the private ritual. 

The light needed constant tending, and the brass work needed constant polishing. Everything was a blur of hauling oil and shoveling coal and scrubbing the floor, with shifting feelings of guilt and anger. Winslow oscillated between lucid and gone at a rate that scared him deeply. He felt wronged. Time abandoned him; every time he thought he had it by the neck, it would melt between his fists. 

After dinner, of the date he wasn’t certain, Wake brought out the last crate of booze and set it on the table between them. It was easy to return to drunkenness, and the warm buzz was comforting: a distortion he could control. Wake laughed, stood up startlingly fast, and started a swaying rendition of a jig.

“Dance Winslow! Dance!”

When he stood, he lacked the ease that Wake had, and felt vomit rise in his throat as everything tilted. But in an effort to please, to do something right, he too started a dance. His eyes rolled in his head, and he tried to sing along with Wake but he couldn’t recognize what was coming out of his own mouth. He tried to sing something he knew from the lumber camps, but it worked only to bring a towhead angel to the front of his mind, burning him and melting like ice. White hair, warm hands. Things were slowing.

_ “Oh, where have all the evenings gone?  _

_ Oh, where is the ale and whisky I’ve tasted? _

_ Gone the same way as the pay I done wasted,  _

_ On a Monday morning.” _

When he leaned into Wake, he was in the quiet of the forest. He didn’t know the waltz, but if he clung hard enough he could keep up. His face was buried in someone's neck, hair brushing his temple. Warm hands were on his back, and distantly someone was singing. It was off-key and tired.

_ “My lover she lies asleep,  _

_ My lover is warm, and her heart is mellow,  _

_ I would give the whole world just to share her pillow,” _

And then he was looking into blue eyes, and a hand was on his cheek, and he was leaning in to the warmth of it-

Something snapped and he was dangerously close to the old man. Terror ran through him for a moment: Where was the snow? The smell campfire smoke? Ephraim? Wake stood before him in confusion, looking at him like a scorned child, and he didn’t know what to do but throw the first punch.

It landed squarely in Wakes gut, and he let out a strangled yelp before driving his fist into Winslow’s eye. He fell back against the china cabinet, and was pinned against it as the old man landed blow after blow. Plates and cups deemed too good for use splintered as Wake beat him. “Get off me! Get  _ off! _ ” He hadn’t meant to sound so pathetic, whining like a bitch, but he did. 

Eventually they both tired, and with the satisfaction of having won against a younger man Wake slumped to the ground. Winslow did too, but lay on his back, too embarrassed to look Wake in the face. His nose was bleeding, and his eye was starting to swell. Desperation led him on his hands and knees across the floor to a bottle of drink, and Wake wordlessly reached out for it. They passed it between them in static silence. 

When Wake moved upstairs, Winslow followed. He wasn’t sure of anything, but the guilt of it all was crushing. He wasn’t sure why Wake let him sit next to him on his bed, or why he sat there. Maybe, if they were both murderers, it was alright. If their sins matched. He felt wary, and desperately wanted to be told he was doing the right thing. He let Wake unbutton his trousers, and he let him cry out in the dark. Through it all, he kept his eyes closed, and imagined that he was in the bunkhouse fighting to keep silent. His own hand muffled his mouth. Wake fell into sleep eventually, and he stared into the old sailors face, knowing that he had betrayed him. He watched the ship burned in fading ink on Wake’s chest as it rose and fell in time with his breaths, sailing an invisible ocean. Winslow longed for that peace.

Winslow leaned back against Wake’s chest and listened to his heart. “D’you trust me? I mean, can I trust you?” 

Wake sat up straighter. “Don’t ye go spilling any of yer beans to me.”

“I just thought I’d say..”

“Ain’t interested.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. Winslow dropped his head back to the old man’s chest. His breath rattled in his lungs like wind through dead trees.

“So I can trust you?”

“No. I told ye, I ain’t to be confided to. Don’t want to hear about yer guilty conscience.”

“I...I just..I can trust you, ‘s all..” His voice was mixed up with drink.

“Ye do?”

“Yes...And so that's why I’m telling you-”

He was so drunk he couldn’t tell if he was even talking. He thought he was. He thought he heard something. When he was finally done, finally had it all laid bare in the open, he looked up at Wake and found him asleep. He sighed and rolled onto the pillow. That night he dreamt of a vice grip on his arm and a floating corpse.  _ His  _ corpse, except it wasn’t, floating on the waves.

The next night was much the same: they fought like sparring waves. Winslow crawled to sitting on his bed. The hardtack he had eaten at dinner settled like a rock in his stomach.

“That’s what I mean,” he slurred his words.

“Wot?” Wake was sitting opposite him, leaning forward. 

“That’s the trouble with you.” Winslow stood.

“That’s the trouble with ye!”

“ _ No _ !” He was yelling, and if he was sombre he might have felt foolish.

“Shut it.” Wake was scowling, but was passive with drink.

“I want a steak! I want a goddamned steak!” 

“You don’t like my cookin’?” He seemed to perk up a bit.

“Oh, don’t be such an old bitch.” Winslow turned to the window. It was dark, and the sky was cold with hollow light.

“Yer drunk, you don’t know what yer talkin’-”

“-how could I possibly like the horseshit you fix us for supper?”

“Them tin kitchen shanty cooks-”

“Yer drunk, or ye wouldn’t be saying that!”

“-gave us fried donuts three times a day-”

“Yer drunk! Yer drunk!”

“-and country ham bigger than yer fist.” Winslow was shouting, and Wake was too. The old man was growing louder by the second.

“I’m drunk? You’ve been drunk since…” He rubbed at his face and tried to stop letting his words slide and knock together, “Drunk since I first laid eyes on you.”

“Damn ye! Let Neptune strick ye dead, Winslow!” Wake was dead serious, “Hark, Triton! Hark!”

Winslow shifted uneasily. Winslow kept going, kept spitting out word after word, fixing him with bulging eyes that pierced his soul. Spit was foaming at the corners of his mouth, caught in his beard.

“... for any stuff or part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul, is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea.” He trembled with it, like he was standing out in the storm. His hands shook at his sides. On the floor Winslow was avoiding his gaze, turning a bottle over in his hands. He wished it was full. Was he damned? He hoped the curse would slide off of his like water down his face. Maybe the use of his false name would protect him? The anger and intent behind the words chewed at his conscience. He doubted his safety.

“Fine. Have it your way. I like your cookin’.”

  
  


Wake fell into sleep eventually, and he stared into the old sailors face,watching the ship burned in fading ink on the man’s chest rose and fell in time with his breaths, sailing an invisible ocean. Winslow longed for that peace.

* * * 

He roused early, and left Wake undisturbed in the bed. He found a coat downstairs, and slipped it on against the rain. Outside, the sky was growing lighter in the dawn, but the clouds stretched to the end of his vision and the wind still blew hard. He looked up at the bedroom window, and then started running as fast as he could to the boathouse. He was panting hard, and the ground was spinning, and the sky was leaking, and  _ oh god! _ There was that terrible scream! Overhead a gull was cackling.

He laced closed the life preserver. The boat was halfway down the tracks when the old man rounded the corner, axe raised, and started swinging. Winslow abandoned it, turning, tripping as he stumbled over the rocks. He kept a fearful hand on the back of his skull, expecting a blow, to have his blood run onto the sand. Wake followed in a stilted lope, crippled leg proving useless. When Winslow cast a fearful glance over his shoulder, he found the wickie far behind him. 

In the kitchen now, the lifevest was off him, and Wake was in the door. The axe bit into the table. Winslow screamed and was not ashamed; he was too far out for that. 

“You crazy son-of-a-bitch! You smashed the boat to pieces!” He pointed at Wake and made a horrible, wheezing, desperate sound.

“Yer abandoning yer post!” Water leaked through the ceiling, ran down the walls.

“What will you do? Report me?”

“Certainly! I’ll write the inspector..” The old man’s face was wild.

“What about me?! I can report  _ you _ ! I know what you’ve done!” He screamed it joyously, like it was a pleasant surprise. Like Christmas morning. Like an answered prayer.

“Who’s reportin’ who? Ephraim Winslow, or Thomas Howard? I know what ye did up in those woods-”

“-You killed your second!” Winslow? Howard?’s face was split in a grin. He had him! Oh, he would make it out yet. He knew the old man’s crime, just as the old man knew his. 

“Your one-eyed junior man! I found him, in the lobster pot. Went mad? You  _ made _ him mad. With your trinkets,” In his pocket was the split effigy, the only comforting thing he had, and he pulled out the pieces and threw them at the Wake. They glanced off the wall behind his head. “I broke it, see? And now I’m free. I’ve got it all now, ‘cept what secret mischief you’re keeping up in that lantern room.”

Wake looked pitying, “By God, Tommy. Last night you made a confession ‘twould make a saint swear. I don’t have nothin’ to confess. But you, Tommy, a-spillin’ yer beans... now look what it’s done to ye. It’s made ye mad. I knew ye was mad when y’smashed up the life boat just now, chasing me with an axe, tryin’ to kill ‘Ol Tom. Don’t y’trust me, Tommy?” He took a few steps closer, and Winslow looked frightened, but didn’t shrink away. “Now give me that knife ye pocketed, y’ain’t safe with it,” He held an open hand, “Come now, give it ‘ere.”

Tommy pressed it into his warm palm, and watched as Wake broke the handle. “I need a smoke.” He looked at Wake and then at the floor and then at Wake. He felt like a child.

“We’re out o’ drink.” 

They both smiled, and then Tommy was leaning into Thomas and it was hysterical.


	10. Theia Mania

Winslow took to sneaking into the lighthouse and to watch the light play out across the ceiling through the bars. If he strained, he could hear what sounded like voices whispering. He would press his ear against the metal and listen to the gentle rising and falling of the sounds. It was as comforting as church hymns back home. He pretended the step he sat on was made of wood: cold metal traded for a church pew. Tommy wanted to get into the chapel at the top of the tower; the ache for it was worse than anything. The guilt, the pain, the frustration. He tore his hands open scratching at the lock. His shoulder was bruised from throwing himself against it.

Sobre life with Wake was unforgiving. He was out of tobacco, and was too proud to ask Wake for any of his. He tried to relieve himself in the shed, but shame cut through him when he did. He did find his solution there, though, in a drum of kerosene.

The honey hardly cut the kerosene, but it made him delirious and that’s what he wanted. Ephraim had fled back to the grave, and with him all pretense of nicety. Tommy’s mouth and nose burned, and when he vomited it brought up clots of blood. Wake was drinking the stuff too, out of the same desperation. They were drinking, and drinking hard, and eventually Tommy fell into the dark headfirst.

When he woke, he was retching. His throat burned, and his stomach was a tight fist. The house was filled with water, which was funny, and he laughed and looked for Wake but didn't see him. When he stood to piss he almost fell into the cold water. 

Out of the corner of his bleary eye, he found a thick book floating open on scummy water. He struggled to button his trousers, and picked up the logbook. It was heavy with water in his arms, like a child. Wet pulp in his fists. Letters were swimming around in his vision and his head was full of static.

_ Assistant given to ritual self-abuse in the supply shed… Work unsatisfactory… Insubordinate again… Recommend severance without pay… _

He found Wake trying to light his pipe, his old hands shaking. His matches were wet, and refused to light. Tommy lit one of his own and held it out.

“Thank ye.” He was looking at him with wide, glassy eyes. Tommy intention was fixed on Wake’s throat. “What happened to yer hand?” 

Tommy slowly looked at the hand that wasn’t outstretched. It looked fine to him. He turned back to Wake’s throat. 

“Yer other one,” he leaned back in the chair away from the thing standing over him. The boy looked at it, and then tucked it into his pocket.

“‘S fine.” His face was still slack.

“Ye ever heard of tetanus?”

“Yep.” Tommy’s voice was pinched. He was boiling, and it showed. Sweat was foaming on his skin, along his temples and down his nose.

“Starts with just a small cut-”

“I said I knew,” He flicked the match into the water at his feet and rubbed hard at his eyes. 

“-an’ then grows through yer bones.”

“Shut up! Shut up! I can’t hear your lies anymore. You’re a whole fiction. You’re now even human any more.” He was shaking with the effort of restraining himself.

“Thought ye had me all figured out.” 

“I do! I do and it’s all horseshit. The stories...everything.”

“Yer not mean’t fer this work. Yer a boy as pretty as a picture. When ye get back to mainland, find yerself a monied lady. Yer relieved of yer duties.”

Tommy reared back in a laugh, and then sprung forward. His open hand twisted in the fabric of Wake’s shirt, and he dragged him to the floor. “I know. I know it already. I found your book.” 

He straddled Wake, struck him in the face and chest in blows that sounded dull and sickening. At first, the old man protested, batted his hands away. Then there was Winslow beneath him, and he recoiled a bit. His hands were warm and slow on his face and neck, trailing down and settling on his throat. And then he couldn’t breathe. The next blow he landed snapped Wake back into his body.

He didn’t feel wrong as he was doing it. Wake deserved the punches, the blows to the face. He deserved the noose around his neck, and he deserved to be treated like a dog. That’s what he was. A liar, and a sinner, and maybe no better than himself. It seared him, and he worked to ignore it. A bad dog was to be kicked; it was only right.

It was almost pitiful how easily he was kicked into the grave, and how willingly he went down. Wake launched into another tirade, something Tommy didn’t care to hear. It, like everything else, was a lie. He tried to ignore the strain in Wake’s voice; to lose himself instead in the rush of the water around them. When the old man went limp, Tommy was upon him in a second. He tore the keys from his pocket and left the body to cool in the grave. 

(something purple)

The house was dark. He took Wake’s pouch of tobacco from it’s spot on the shelf and rolled himself a cigarette. His palms were crawling from the nerves of it; and he tried to steel himself with another biting swig of honeyed kerosene. It burned all the way down. As he was standing, rolling the set of keys over in his palm, he thought of where he would be had he not killed Winslow. If maybe things would be better.

“The light belongs ta me!” And there in the door was Thomas, covered in dirt. It fell from his clothes, his face, his hair. It turned to mud on his lips. In a rush of weathered hands and burning eyes and inhuman fury, an axe blade was buried deep in the muscle of Tommy’s shoulder. He felt the impact, dulled by the kerosene and the exhaustion; the grinding crack as it scraped bone.

And then he struck the old man, who was feebly standing, drained by the effort. He hit the ground and made no attempt to rise, just lay there. His eyes were averted, as if Tom was not worth looking at.

“Tommy, damn you!” But it died in his throat at the axe split his skull. Tommy looked at the mess: the shattered face of someone who he had grown to know. He looked at the blood soaking through his shirt. He felt dizzy, and he knew that if he was to ask for forgiveness, he would need to do it  _ now _ .

He was burning with pain that grew in his shoulder and radiated up his neck, down his chest. The keys were cold in his hand, and he found it difficult to keep his grip. Thomas Howard was reduced to crawling like an animal, everything catching up with him in one great wave.

When he made it to the top of the stairs, panting, he scraped at the lock until the key fit. He was tense with anticipation, and though his hands shook, his heart leapt at the  _ click  _ and release of the lock. The grate swung open, and for a moment he held his breath and closed his eyes. And then he rose.

The lens was more beautiful than anything he imagined. It hummed and whirred on its brass tracks, glittering like ice. It hurt to look at, but he was already in pain and did not shrink away. The glass was angled like the scales of a fish: the center pane an all-seeing eye. The light itself looked wet and trembling, like still air before a heavy rain. As the door swung towards him, opening slowly in the rushing sound of breathy voices, all he could think was, “ _ Please.” _

Where the wick should have been was a terrible splendor of burning nothing. A hole cut from the fabric of the world in the shape of a human face; all the light focused in a burning point on his soul. It was pure pleasure and burning ecstasy and horrible pain. His breaths came in hard rushes, and his heart was beating hard enough to shake his whole body, and the more he looked the better he felt. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it this far, holy fuck?!?! and also I love you. This self-indulgent rewrite was meant to explore characterization. I swear, this was meant to be a short, 5 ch. fic of vignettes showcasing their relationship, but I got... more than a little carried away. Asvgfyhudbfghb. Good practice, I guess. Also, expect some minor edits for grammar + adding the missing poem/painting intros to a few chapters in the future. I've had the draft finished since January, and after months of not touching it, I had a "fuck it" moment and decided to just post. From ch. 3 on is;;; unedited draft fvgbhnjm. Which is horrible form, I know, but better late and sloppy then,,, never??? wsedrftghj. Thanks for getting through this mess <3! For my first fic, I'm ok with it, ya know? (AKA im sick of looking at it in my google docs so im dumping this mess on you!! have funvtfgyhb)


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